Photo by Julieta Cervantes
Young Jean Lee is a playwright and director who has been called “the most adventurous downtown playwright of her generation” byThe New York Times and “one of the best experimental playwrights in America” by Time Out New York. She has written and directed nine shows in New York with Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company and toured her work to over thirty cities around the world. She’s made an album, We’re Gonna Die, with her band Future Wife, and directed a short film, Here Come the Girls. Her plays have been published by Theatre Communications Group (Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven and Other Plays, The Shipment andLear) and by Samuel French (Three Plays by Young Jean Lee). She is currently under commission from Lincoln Center Theater, Playwrights Horizons, and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. She has an MFA from Mac Wellman’s playwriting program at Brooklyn College, and is a resident filmmaker at the Wooster Group. She has received grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Creative Capital, NYFA, NEA, NYSCA, the Jerome Foundation, the Greenwall Foundation, and the Rockefeller MAP Foundation. She is also the recipient of two OBIE awards, the Festival Prize of the Zuercher Theater Spektakel, a 2010 Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship, and a 2012 Doris Duke Artist Award. Her play STRAIGHT WHITE MEN made its world premiere at the Wexner Center an its New York premiere at the Public Theater, to acclaim in 2014. She is currently working on her second short film, A Meaning Full Life, starring Paul Lazar, Wallace Shawn, and Kate Valk.
Last Updated: January 22, 2015