Artist, musician. Born in Tokyo, Japan (Widow of musician John Lennon). She moved to the United States while a teenager and studied art at New York's Sarah Lawrence College. In 1957, she married Japanese composer Toshi Ichiyanagi. In 1964, they divorced and she took her second husband--artist and filmmaker Tony Cox. The couple, married for five years, had one child, Kyoko. During the 1960s, Ono was successful as a conceptual artist in New York City, and in 1966, she met John Lennon, a member of the Beatles, a world-famous British rock group. The pair fell instantly in love, and in 1969, they married and Lennon changed his name to John Ono Lennon. The couple collaborated both musically and politically, staging publicized antiwar protests and recording a hit single “Give Peace a Chance,” under the name of The Plastic Ono Band. In 1970, the Beatles split-up, and Yoko continued to record and perform music with her husband throughout the 1970s. The couple briefly separated in the early 1970s, but by 1975 were back together. In the same year, the couple had a son, Sean, and retired to raise him full-time. In 1980, they publicly reemerged with the album Double Fantasy, in which they shared creative responsibility. Later in the year, Lennon was assassinated outside of their New York apartment building. During the 1980s, Ono continued working on her experimental art and music. She released a series of avant-garde albums [Season of Glass, It's Alright (I See Rainbows), and Starpeace], culminating in the 1992 release of Onobox, a 6-CD compilation. She also composed two off-Broadway musicals. In 1995, she engaged in a collaborative project with her twenty-year-old son Sean and his rock band Ima, which resulted in the critically acclaimed album, Rising. Her latest solo effort, Blueprint for a Sunrise, was released in 2001.

In October 2002, she commemorated what would have been John Lennon's 62nd birthday by establishing the LennonOno Grant for Peace. Ono presented $50,000 checks Palestinian artist Khalil Rabah and Israeli artist Zvi Goldstein at the United Nations headquarters in New York.