YOUNG JEAN LEE (Artistic Director) was born in Korea in 1974 and moved to the United States when she was two years old. She grew up in Pullman, WA and attended college at UC 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 (LEAR; THE APPEAL), The Kitchen (THE SHIPMENT), The Public Theater (CHURCH), P.S. 122 (CHURCH; PULLMAN, WA), HERE Arts Center (SONGS OF THE DRAGONS FLYING TO HEAVEN), and the Ontological-Hysteric Theater (GROUNDWORK OF THE METAPHYSIC OF MORALS). 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.

Her plays have been published in New Downtown Now (an anthology edited by Mac Wellman and herself), in Three Plays by Young Jean Lee (Samuel French), American Theatre magazine (September 2007), and in a collection of all of her plays entitled Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven and Other Plays (Theatre Communications Group). She and her company have been the recipients of grants from the Creative Capital Foundation (2009), Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (2009), MAP / Doris Duke Charitable Foundation Creative Exploration Fund (2009), Tobin Foundation for Theater Arts Grant (2009), Edith Lutyens and Norman Bel Geddes Foundation Grant (2009), Arts Presenters/Ford Foundation Creative Capacity Grant (2008), New York State Council on the Arts (2007), the Rockefeller MAP Foundation (2007), The Greenwall Foundation (2006, 2009), the Jerome Foundation (2007, 2008), Rockefeller MAP Grant (2006) and Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2005). Her work has been invited to tour to venues in Paris, Vienna, Hannover, Berlin, Zurich, Brussels, Bergen, Oslo, Trondheim, Rotterdam, Salamanca, Toulouse, Chicago, Chapel Hill, Portland, Seattle, Philadelphia, Columbus, Pittsburgh, and Minneapolis. Young Jean is currently under commission from Lincoln Center Theater, Playwrights Horizons, and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. She is the artistic director of Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company and is the recipient of a 2009 Brooklyn College Young Alumni Award, the ZKB Patronage Prize 2007 of the Zuercher Theater Spektakel, and a 2007 Emerging Playwright OBIE Award.