Young Jean Lee

YOUNG JEAN LEE was born in Korea in 1974 and moved to the United States when she was two. She grew up in Pullman, WA and attended college at UC Berkeley, where she majored in English. Immediately after college, she entered Berkeley's English PhD program, where she studied Shakespeare for six years before dropping out and moving to New York to become a playwright in 2002. Since then, she has directed her plays at the Public Theater (CHURCH), (P.S. 122 (CHURCH; Pullman, WA), HERE Arts Center (Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven), Soho Rep (The Appeal), and the Ontological-Hysteric Theater (Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals). She has worked with Radiohole and the National Theater of the United States of America. She is a member of New Dramatists and 13P, has done residencies at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, and has an MFA from Mac Wellman's playwriting program at Brooklyn College. Her plays have been published in New Downtown Now, an anthology edited by Mac Wellman and herself, in Three Plays by Young Jean Lee (Samuel French), American Theatre magazine (September 2007), and will soon be published in a collection of all of her plays entitled Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven and Other Plays (Theatre Communications Group). She is the recipient of grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Rockefeller MAP Foundation, the Greenwall Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, and the New York State Council on the Arts. Her work has been invited to tour to venues in Vienna, Hannover, Berlin, Zurich, Brussels, Bergen, Oslo, Trondheim, Rotterdam, Salamanca, Toulouse, Portland, Seattle, Philadelphia, Columbus, Pittsburgh, and Minneapolis. She will direct her new play The Shipment at the Walker Art Center from October 30-November 2, 2008, and at The Kitchen from January 8-24, 2009. She will direct her adaptation of King Lear at Soho Rep in January 2010, and has been commissioned to write a new musical (with music by Mike Doughty) for Playwrights Horizons. She is the artistic director of Young Jean Lee's Theater Company (www. youngjeanlee.org) and is the recipient of the ZKB Patronage Prize 2007 of the Zuercher Theater Spektakel and a 2007 Emerging Playwright OBIE Award.