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.