haruna lee

Haruna Lee is an award-winning Taiwanese-Japanese-American theater maker, screenwriter, educator, and community steward whose work is rooted in a liberation-based healing practice. Their plays are often portals into personal and collective stories navigating transcultural experiences and memories, and the conflicts that arise when dealing with the simultaneity, contradictions and pluralities of self. Through their artistic modalities and teaching, they promote arts activism and emergent strategies for the theater through ethical and process-based collaborations that challenge coloniality and legacies of power, while inviting the fullness of marginalized bodies and the complexity of that lived experience to this practice.

Since 2010, Lee has created six original works with their company harunalee, which lovingly disbanded in 2020. Learn more about the company here.

Lee’s works include Suicide Forest, hailed by the New York Times as "Vivid, haunted, heart-stingingly tender and explicitly personal...A wild ride of a production" (NYT Critic’s Pick) directed by Aya Ogawa, is an investigation of how Japanese suicide has symbolically permeated the playwright's transcultural and social identities, and received a world premiere at The Bushwick Starr in 2019, with an Off-Broadway remount in 2020 with Ma-Yi Theater Company. plural (love), a collaboration between Lee and Jen Goma, is an auto-theoretical performance installation that flirts with the boundaries of desire, power, and responsibility, building an environment that feels akin to stepping into a soft BDSM roleplay. It has been developed by New Georges (2016-2017),the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab (2017-2019) and WP Pipeline Festival (2021-2022). harunalee’s Memory Retrograde, an exploration of one couple’s past-life regressions through vast expanses of generations and landscapes revealing how memory and trauma is racialized, gendered, and fallible over time, was developed at Brooklyn Arts Exchange (2015-2017), Ars Nova Maker’s Lab (2017), and was produced by harunalee and Ars Nova as part of The Public’s Under The Radar Festival Incoming! Series (2018). With to the left of the pantry and under the sugar shack, harunalee created an immersive and visual installation-based piece inspired by The Art of Memory by Francis Yates and the concept of the Memory Palace, which showcased 40+ artists and scientists who presented new works inspired by individual memories crowd sourced by the company, and had its world premiere at La MaMa Club (2016). War Lesbian, described as “Moving and revelatory” by Stage Buddy, is a queer experimental play with music based on Inuit mythology and F.T. Martinelli’s Futurist Manifesto, which had its world premiere at Dixon Place as part of the Mondo Cane! Commission & Residency (2014 Time Out NY LGBT Critic’s Pick).

Lee is a recipient of a Steinberg Playwright Award (2021), an Obie Award in Playwriting for the Conception and Writing of Suicide Forest (2019), for which they received grants from The MAP Fund (2018), the National Endowment for the Arts (2019), and the New York State Council of the Arts (2019). Lee has been recognized with The Bret Adams & Paul Reisch Foundation Ollie New Play Award (2021), FCA Grants to Artists Award (2021), Mohr Visiting Artist Fellowship at Stanford University (2020-2021), a MacDowell Fellowship, including the Keith Haring Fellowship (2020/2021), the Lotos Foundation Prize for Theater Directing (2017), and a New Dramatists Van Lier Playwriting Fellowship (2010). They are part of the 2019 artEquity National Facilitator Training cohort and the 2020-2022 WP Theater Lab, and are the co-founder and lead facilitator of the Women-Trans-Femme-Non Binary (WTFNB) Asian Diasporic Performance Makers Potluck. They have been a member of the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab, The Public’s Devised Theater Working Group, P73 Interstate 73 Writer’s Group, and has held residencies and commissions with Ars Nova Maker’s Lab, Brooklyn Arts Exchange Artist-in-Residence, Dixon Place Mondo Cane! Commission & Residency, and the Bushwick Starr Propeller Project Series. They have also received development opportunities with Drop Forge and Tool, Space on Ryder Farm, Little Theater, Prelude Festival, York College, Food For Thought/Danspace, Target Margin Lab Series, and Asian American Writer’s Workshop.

Their writing has been published by 53rd State Press, including Suicide Forest and in Occasional No. 2 (2018), and by Table Work Press, in the anthology Plays For Our Younger Selves (2020).

As a performer, Lee has worked with Aya Ogawa on The Nosebleed, Mac Wellman on The Offending Gesture, with David Lang & Rachel Chavkin on Little Match Girl Passion at Met Breur, Cesar Alvarez’s Futurity (Lortel Award 2016), Great Lakes with Kate Benson & Lee Sunday Evans (Obie Winner 2015), Andrea Geyer’s 2012 Whitney Biennial Comrades of Time, Taylor Mac’s The Lily’s Revenge (Obie Winner 2010), NAATCO, Minor Theater, The Drunkard’s Wife, Ralph Lee and the Mettawee River Theater Co., and Anohni- among others.

Lee is currently writing for Apple TV+’s Pachinko and HBO Max’s The Flight Attendant, and developing multiple projects for TV. They are also co-directing the Brooklyn College MFA Playwriting Program alongside Dennis A. Allen II. They have taught playwriting and performance at NYU Experimental Theater Wing, Stanford, Playwrights Horizons Theater School, PACE University, York College, and Abrons Arts Center. They hold an MFA from Brooklyn College for Playwriting where they studied with Mac Wellman and Erin Courtney. BFA from NYU Tisch School of the Arts Experimental Theater Wing.

Artist Statement

Through my plays, I have been developing a poetics that gives voice to and examines themes and ideas I’ve been drawn to all my life; these themes are a collision of images that extend towards personal and collective liberation- of truths and riddles that perplex and bring into light the fragmented experiences of Asian American / Immigrant / Queer & Non Binary bodies, life and death as literal and metaphorical events, the pluralities of sex & desire, and the intersection of psychic experience that ruptures our daily rituals and process of healing. For me, to write a play or performance text is to create radical landscapes that are a visual collage, always offering a space for our sacred mess to pan out while formulating my own sense of play-logic. I strive to create theater that honors the complex, the multiple, the layered intersectionality of our being while tapping into non-linear form and liminal spaces to meditate on the more spectacular, terrifying and disruptive bodies of thought and energy that exist in our deeper spirit and subconscious. 

I am committed to organizing arts activism that engages my theater community with ‘ethical collaborations’, promoting the responsibility of individual artists, institutions, and companies working together to create a more equitable, inclusive, and transparent practice that begins by holding one another accountable. You can find harunalee’s statement on equity and ethical collaborations here.

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Photo by Heather Sten.