Short answers, pulled from the story.
Yoko Ono was born in Tokyo on the 18th of February 1933. Her father Eisuke was a wealthy banker and former classical pianist descended from a long line of samurai warrior-scholars, and her mother Isoko was the granddaughter of an affiliate of the Yasuda clan and zaibatsu.
Yoko Ono first met John Lennon on the 7th of November 1966 at the Indica Gallery in London, where she was preparing her conceptual art exhibition Unfinished Paintings and Objects. They were introduced by gallery owner John Dunbar. Lennon climbed a white ladder and read the word YES through a magnifying glass, a positive message he found striking amid the anti-everything art world of the time.
On the 20th of March 1969, Lennon and Ono married at the registry office in Gibraltar and spent their honeymoon in Amsterdam staging a week-long bed-in for peace as a protest against the Vietnam War. When denied entry to the United States for a planned second bed-in, they held it at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, where they recorded "Give Peace a Chance".
On the evening of the 8th of December 1980, Lennon and Ono were at the Record Plant Studio working on her song "Walking on Thin Ice". When they returned to their Manhattan apartment building The Dakota, Lennon was shot dead by Mark David Chapman, who had been stalking him for two months. Ono cradled the dying Lennon in her arms.
Yoko Ono won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year at the 24th Annual Grammy Awards in 1981 for Double Fantasy, her collaborative album with John Lennon. The album had been released on the 17th of November 1980, just three weeks before Lennon was murdered, and received an instant critical reappraisal following his death.
Cut Piece was first performed on the 7th of November 1964 at the Yamaichi Concert Hall in Kyoto. Ono knelt on stage in her best suit with a pair of scissors in front of her and invited audience members to cut away pieces of her clothing, sitting silently until she chose to end the work. The piece confronted issues of gender, class, and cultural identity, and has been reprised at venues including Carnegie Hall in 1965 and, most recently, at the Tate Modern retrospective in 2024.