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 PhD 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
MFA 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.
