HARUNALEE
is Haruna Lee:
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.
∞ In The News ∞
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Haruna Lee wins 2020 Obie Award for Conception & Writing of Suicide Forest
Gratitudes
“We have to reclaim the sacred ground from which the world is made- our imaginations. There is a part of each of us that can see beyond what exists.”
– from Dream Beyond the Wounds by Adrienne Maree Brown
∞
A moment to touch my Taiwanese and Japanese ancestors:
To them who have been fiercely guiding me through the Unknown channels,
And to all those of the Asian Diaspora-
Especially women / trans / femme / non binary folx-
I walk alongside you.
Another moment to touch the incredible upheaval and uprising:
To pour my love into this fight for Black liberation and my BIPOC beloveds;
Love only continues to liberate me.
∞
To my mother Aoi Lee, who showed up with courage and walked through this portal with me.
To Aya Ogawa, my forever collaborator who I'll mention over and over again.
To Adrienne Kennedy for showing me the simultaneity of psychic worlds.
To the Aokigahara Forest, for allowing me to harness its power towards a creative purpose.
∞
And to all who witnessed this work. Who whole-heartedly encouraged me, and supported it.
“a season to celebrate asian-american theater is lost to pandemic”
The New York Times
Working with the director Aya Ogawa, also of Japanese descent, made a difference, too…“That felt like a revelation.”
- Interview with Cathy Park Hong for The New York Times. Photo by Heather Sten.
SUICIDE FOREST on
VULTURE’S Top 10 Shows of 2019
Tickets now on sale
SUICIDE FOREST OFF-BROADWAY!
with Ma-yi theater co. february 25 - march 22, 2020
Use code “FRIENDS” for $35 Tickets for the entire run, between now and January 31st!
Get your TICKETS HERE.
- New York Times
"Moving and revelatory in a way I don't think I've experienced in the theater before"
- Stage Buddy
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Join us for a time-bending adventure that follows a pair of lovers through an epic expanse of generations and landscapes- the Venetian Renaissance, a 1970s doctor’s office, and a virtual reality forest in the near future- all through a dioramic triptych negotiating the inextricable relationship of how memory is racialized and gendered over time. We are currently SOLD OUT for our run, but there will also be a waitlist starting 30 min prior to each performance (and we think there's a great chance of getting in!)