Lauren Yee has been a Dramatists Guild fellow, a MacDowell Colony fellow, and a member of the Public Theater Emerging Writers Group. She has been a finalist for the Djerassi Resident Artist Program, the Heideman Award, the Jerome Fellowship, the PEN USA Literary Award for Drama, the PONY Fellowship, and the Wasserstein Prize.
Other honors include 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 and Theatre Bay Area.
Her full-length play Ching Chong Chinaman was a finalist for the 2008 Princess Grace Award and the winner of the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival’s 2010 Paula Vogel Award and Kumu Kahua Theatre’s 2007 Pacific Rim Prize. Named one of the top 10 plays by the East Bay Express and City Pages, the play has been produced at Berkeley’s Impact Theatre, Minneapolis’s Mu Performing Arts, the New York International Fringe Festival, New York City’s Pan Asian Rep, and Seattle’s SIS Productions. The play will be published by Samuel French later this year.
The Bay Area Playwrights Festival, the Kennedy Center, the O’Neill Studio at Yale, and PlayGround have previously commissioned her work. Apart from writing, she has served as founding executive director of the San Francisco Young Playwrights Festival and Youth for Asian Theater. She has taught playwriting at the New York Mills Arts Center, Tao House, and UCSD. She is a member of the Dramatists Guild and the Playwrights’ Center.
She is currently working on new commissions for AlterTheater (slated for production in 2011), the Kennedy Center, and Mu Performing Arts (with support from the MAP Fund). She is spending this summer in residence at the Hangar Theatre’s Lab Company, the O’Neill Conference, and the Williamstown Theatre Festival. She is a current nominee for the 2010 Wasserstein Prize.
A graduate of Yale University, Lauren is pursuing her MFA in playwriting at UCSD, studying under Naomi Iizuka.
