Young Jean Lee

Young Jean Lee is a writer and director who has been called “the most adventurous downtown playwright of her generation” by the 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 is a resident filmmaker at the Wooster Group, she’s made an album, We’re Gonna Die, with her band Future Wife, and she’s directed the short film Here Come the Girls (Locarno International Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival). Her plays have been published by Theatre Communications Group (Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven and Other Plays, The Shipment and Lear) 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, and recently completed a screenplay commission for Plan B/Paramount Pictures. 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, a 2012 Doris Duke Artist Award, and a 2013 Doris Duke Artist Residency. She is currently working on her new show, STRAIGHT WHITE MEN, which will premiere at the Wexner Center and Public Theater in 2014, as well as her second short film, A Meaning Full Life, starring Paul Lazar, Wallace Shawn, and Kate Valk.

“Young Jean Lee is, hands down, the most adventurous downtown playwright of her generation.” – The New York Times

“She offers the pleasure of brazen theatrical inventiveness.” – The New Yorker