Mia Chung's plays include You for Me for You, Catch as Catch Can, and This Exquisite Corpse.
Mia's play Catch as Catch Can will be produced at Steppenwolf in 2020; the play had a world premiere produced by Page 73 at the New Ohio Theatre in Fall 2018.
You for Me for You had a UK premiere at the Royal Court Theatre, a Korean premiere at the National Theatre Center of Korea, a US premiere at Woolly Mammoth Theatre (DC), and multiple productions around the country. The play is published by Bloomsbury Methuen Drama.
Her work has been supported by awards, commissions, fellowships, residencies, and workshops including the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Berkeley Rep's Ground Floor, Blue Mountain Center, Civilians’ R&D Group, Clubbed Thumb, EST/Sloan Commission, Frederick Loewe Award in Music-Theatre, Hedgebrook Women Playwrights Festival, Icicle Creek Theatre Festival, Inkwell, JAW, Kennedy Center, LAByrinth Theatre Company, Magic Theatre, Ma-Yi Theatre, Mu Performing Arts, the NEA, NYTW Dartmouth, Orchard Project, Page 73, Page Salon, Playwrights' Center Jerome Fellowship, Playwrights Realm, RISCA, The Royal Court, South Coast Rep, Southern Rep, the Stavis Playwright Award, Stella Adler Studio, TCG, and the Unicorn Theatre in London.
Her work is included in Fifty Playwrights on Their Craft (Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2018), The Kilroys List: 99 Monologues by Female & Trans* Playwrights, Vol 1 (Theatre Communications Group, 2016) and The Best Women’s Stage Monologues of 2013 (Smith & Kraus).
She is an alumni member of the Ma-Yi Writers Lab, the Huntington Theatre playwright fellows, and New Dramatists. She attended Yale (BA); the University of Dublin, Trinity College (M.Phil.); and Brown (MFA).
ND Activity
Board of Directors
Each fiscal year four current resident playwrights are appointed to the Board of Directors by the Writers' Executive Committee. The playwright board members enjoy full voting and decision-making powers minus the financial requirements of non-playwright directors. They provide a valuable and artist-centered perspective on the governance of New Dramatists.
Callaway Award
The Callaway Award is given annually to a member of the outgoing resident playwright class for their inspired and generous service to the New Dramatists community during their seven year residencies.
Composer-Librettist Studio
Our annual Composer-Librettist Studio focuses simultaneously on music-theatre development and the principles of collaboration, teaming five writers with five composers and five performers to develop brand-new works of musical theatre. At the end of the Studio, each playwright has worked with each composer and 25 new music-theatre pieces have been created by the group.
Creativity Fund
The Creativity Fund blends the flexibility of a one-day play reading with the intensive focus of a two-week workshop, providing ten to fifteen playwrights per year the opportunity to program three to five day workshops on an ad hoc basis. Creativity Fund workshops are structured according to each writer's needs at any stage of development and are funded through a lead grant from the Andew W. Mellon Foundation.
Loewe Award
The Frederick Loewe Award is an annual award (selected by an outside committee) in music-theatre given to a New Dramatists playwright and his/her composer partner for the development of a new music-theatre work.
Nocturnal Commissions
Nocturnal Commissions is a marathon evening of instant theatre, New Dramatists style. First, the opportunity to commission new plays by New Dramatists resident and alumni playwrights is auctioned to the highest bidder; second, the writer and their winning bidder meet for a lightning-fast commission; third, each writer has about 20 minutes to create a new short theatre piece, monologue, or song; fourth, the plays are rehearsed upstairs while the audience has dinner downstairs; and last, all the evening's commissioned pieces are presented by a first-rate company of actors and directors.
PlayTime
Launched in 2002, the PlayTime Developmental Studio provides five New Dramatists writers with a two-week writers' retreat, right in the heart of New York City. PlayTime is a laboratory designed to give playwrights the opportunity to explore, workshop, rethink, and revise ambitious new works of theatre by drawing from a supportive resident company of actors, directors, stage managers, staff, and fellow playwrights.
Writers' Executive Committee
The Writers' Executive Committee is a voluntary grouping of resident playwrights who meet throughout the year to discuss and make decisions concerning the work of New Dramatists and to help guide the organization.
Playwright Buzz
August 13, 2015
“From the return of Martin McDonagh to theatre with a hilarious and dark new play, to Mia Chung’s play about North Korean sisters fleeing the regime, this autumn is a season which purely encompasses all that the Royal Court is about."
Read more: Autumn Season 2015 at The Royal Court Theatre
