Itagaki’s work brings together illustration, comics, publishing, and historical storytelling, with a particular sensitivity to memory, displacement, and lived experience. Before turning fully to image-making, she worked across translation and at a Japanese video game company, a background that gives her visual narratives a cross-cultural clarity and attentiveness to context.

Since beginning her book work, she has illustrated ten titles, many grounded in real history, with nine receiving awards in Lithuania and abroad. Her first illustrated book, Siberian Haiku, became a major success, winning wide recognition and appearing in more than fifteen languages, including Japanese. Her illustrated and published book A Girl with a Gun: A Story about a Girl Partisan has also received multiple awards and is set to reach readers in eight languages.