Lauren Yee is a 2008/09 Dramatists Guild fellow, a 2009 MacDowell Colony fellow, and a member of the 2009 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 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 Mu Performing Arts in Minneapolis, Impact Theatre in Berkeley, and the New York International Fringe Festival. This spring, the play will debut at New York City’s Pan Asian Rep and Seattle’s SIS Productions.
The Bay Area Playwrights Festival, the O’Neill Studio at Yale, and PlayGround have all 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.
She is currently working on a new commission for AlterTheater (slated for production in 2011) and treatments for the Kennedy Center’s Heritage Project. This summer, she will attend the inaugural El Gouna Writers Residency along Egypt’s Red Sea and complete an observership at the O’Neill Conference.
A graduate of Yale University, Lauren is pursuing her MFA in playwriting at UCSD, studying under Naomi Iizuka.
