Lynne Yamamoto teaches courses in three-dimensional design and installation. She is on the advisory committee for the Book Concentration.

Her work as an artist engages notions of place and memory. She is interested in how narratives of seemingly ordinary people open out to have larger implications historically and geographically. She uses materials poetically and tactically. Past projects have dealt with the dangerous manipulation of the cherry blossom as a wartime symbol in Japan (Resplendent); the twinned histories of the pineapple, as exotic status symbol and plantation commodity fruit (Smooth Cayenne); and class and immigration in early 20th-century Hawai'i (Genteel).

She participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program and Skowhegan School. She was selected for the National Studio Program at P.S. 1 and residencies at Urbanglass, Brooklyn; Banff Centre for the Arts; Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh, Ireland; Civitella Ranieri, Umbertide, Italy; the Arts/Industry Residency at Kohler Company, Wisconsin; and the Taipei Artist Village International Artist in Residence program in Taiwan.

Yamamoto has had one-person shows at The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu; articule, Montreal; P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center; Greg Kucera Gallery and George Suyama Architect Space, Seattle; Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris; Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design; Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh; and P.P.O.W., New York. Grants and awards she has received include the New York Foundation for the Arts, Artist-in-Residence Program; Anonymous Was A Woman; Japan-United States Arts Program of the Asian Arts Council; Creative Capital Foundation Grant; Penny McCall Foundation Award, LEF Foundation Grant, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant and a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Fellowship. She has a permanent work in the Seattle Central Library.