2015 Resident Playwright
Lauren Yee
This year, you’re going to be hearing a lot from Lauren Yee… at least on the Chance stage. We are producing the West Coast Premiere of her play Samsara (which just received its world premiere at Victory Gardens in February), as well as readings of two of her newer plays as part of our On The Radar Series — King of the Yees and The Tiger Among Us. We’re very excited to have Lauren as a resident playwright this year, so let’s find out a little more about her…
Lauren was born and raised in San Francisco. She received her bachelor’s degree from Yale University, and her MFA in playwriting from UCSD, where she studied under Naomi Iizuka.
She was a Dramatists Guild fellow, a MacDowell fellow, a MAP Fund grantee, and a member of The Public Theater’s Emerging Writers Group. She has been a finalist for the Jerome Fellowship, the PONY Fellowship, the Princess Grace Award, the Sundance Theatre Lab, and the Wasserstein Prize. Her play Samsara has been a nominee for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and the L. Arnold Weissberger Award. Her work has been published by Samuel French.
Her full-length work has been produced at AlterTheater, Artists at Play, City Lights Theatre Company, Company One, fu-GEN, the Hub Theatre, Impact Theatre, Moxie Theatre, Mu Performing Arts, Pan Asian Rep, SIS Productions, and others.
Lauren’s work has also been developed at Lincoln Center Theatre/LCT3, the Goodman Theatre, The Public Theater, Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre, Playwrights Realm, Second Stage Theatre, Centerstage, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Aurora Theatre, the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, East West Players, the Hangar Theatre, Kitchen Dog Theatre, the Magic Theatre, Orlando Shakespeare Festival, PlayPenn, and the Playwrights’ Center.
Her play The Hatmaker’s Wife was an Outer Critics Circle nominee for the John Gassner Award for best play by a new American playwright. Ching Chong Chinaman was picked as a top 10 play of the year by City Pages and the East Bay Express, and Crevice was a Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle nominee for Best Play. Other honors include three Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival playwriting awards, Kumu Kahua Theatre’s Pacific Rim Prize, and writing fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, the Byrdcliffe Artist Colony, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, the El Gouna Writers’ Residency, the Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers, and the New York Mills Cultural Center. She has also received funding from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, Theatre Bay Area, and UCSD’s Institute for International, Comparative, and Area Studies, as well as an award from PlayGround’s New Play Production Fund.
Lauren is a Time Warner Fellow at the Women’s Project Playwrights Lab and a member of the Ma-Yi Theatre Writers Lab, as well as the Shank playwright-in-residence at Second Stage Theatre and the Page One resident playwright at Playwrights Realm. She is currently under commission from the Goodman Theatre, Lincoln Center Theatre/LCT3, Mixed Blood Theatre, Encore Theatre Company (with support from the Gerbode Foundation), and TheatreworksUSA, a theater for young audiences.
More at laurenyee.com
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