| Young Jean Lee | |
|---|---|
| Born | May 30, 1974 Daegu, South Korea |
| Period | Contemporary |
| Genres | Playwright, director |
| Literary movement | Experimental, Avant-garde |
|
www.youngjeanlee.org |
|
| Young Jean Lee | |
|---|---|
| Hangul | 이영진 |
| Revised Romanization | Yi Yeongjin |
| McCune–Reischauer | Yi Yǒngjin |
Young Jean Lee (born 1974) is a Brooklyn-based playwright and director working in experimental theater. She is the artistic director of Young Jean Lee's Theater Company, a not-for-profit theater company dedicated to producing her work. Lee was called "one of the best experimental playwrights in America" by David Cote in Time Out New York.[1]
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Lee was born in South Korea in 1974 and moved to the United States when she was two years old. She grew up in Pullman, Washington and attended college at UC Berkeley, where she majored in English. Immediately after college, Lee entered UC Berkeley’s English PhD program, where she studied Shakespeare for six years. In 2002, she moved to New York to become a playwright. She received an MFA from Mac Wellman's playwriting program at Brooklyn College.[2]
Lee's plays have premiered in New York City at Soho Repertory Theater (Lear,[3] The Appeal[4]), The Kitchen (The Shipment[5]), The Public Theater (Church), P.S. 122 (Church,[6] Pullman, WA[7]), HERE Arts Center (Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven[8]), and the Ontological-Hysteric Theater (Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals). Her work has toured venues in Paris, Vienna, Hannover, Berlin, Zurich, Brussels, Budapest, Sydney, Bergen, Oslo, Trondheim, Rotterdam, Salamanca, Toulouse, Chicago, Chapel Hill, Portland, Seattle, Philadelphia, Columbus, Pittsburgh, Boston, Williamstown, and Minneapolis. Lee is currently under commission from Lincoln Center Theater, Playwrights Horizons, and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
Outside her own company, Lee has worked with Radiohole and the National Theater of the United States of America. She is a member of New Dramatists and 13P, and has been awarded residencies from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, and Hedgebrook.
Lee's plays have been published in New Downtown Now,[9] an anthology edited with Mac Wellman, Three Plays by Young Jean Lee,[10] American Theatre magazine,[11] Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven and Other Plays,[12] and The Shipment and Lear.[13]
Lee was a finalist for the 2010 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for The Shipment,[14] and a recipient of the 2009 Brooklyn College Young Alumni Award, the ZKB Patronage Prize 2007 of the Zürcher Theater Spektakel,[15] the 2007 Emerging Playwright OBIE Award, and a 2010 Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.[16] She is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow.[17]