Conversation with Playwright Young Jean Lee

Conversation with Playwright Young Jean Lee

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Young Jean Lee, playwright and author of The Shipment, engages in conversation with Columbia College’s John Green.

Young Jean Lee is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow, and was named by American Theatre magazine as one of the twenty-five artists who will shape the American theater over the next twenty-five years. She was born in Korea, grew up in Pullman, Washington, and attended college at University of California Berkeley, where she majored in English. Immediately after college, she entered Berkeley’s English Ph.D. program, where she studied Shakespeare for six years before moving to New York to become a playwright in 2002. Since then, she has directed her plays at Soho Rep, the Kitchen, the Public Theater, P.S. 122, HERE Arts Center, and the Ontological-Hysteric Theater, and performed in her play We’re Gonna Die (with band Future Wife) at Joe’s Pub. 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, the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, and Hedgebrook, and has an M.F.A. from Mac Wellman’s playwriting program at Brooklyn College. Lee is currently under commission from Plan B/Paramount Pictures, Lincoln Center Theater, Playwrights Horizons, and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.