Bio
Hansol Jung’s plays include Wolf Play, Merry Me, Wild Goose Dreams, Cardboard Piano, Among the Dead, No More Sad Things, Last Call: a play with cocktails, and Romeo and Juliet: a modern translation.
Her plays owe their life to theaters like Ma-Yi Theater, The National Asian American Theatre Company, New York Theatre Workshop, The Public Theater, Soho Rep., New Jersey’s Two River Theater, La Jolla Playhouse, Portland’s Artists Repertory Theatre, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Boise Contemporary Theater, and Chicago’s Sideshow Theatre (RIP). She has developed work with the support from institutions such as the Ground Floor at Berkeley Rep, Virgin Festival at Magic Theatre, Ignition Festival at Victory Gardens (RIP), Sundance Theatre Lab (RIP), the O’Neill Theater Center, London’s Royal Court, and Grahamstown Festival in South Africa. She is currently working on commissions from Manhattan Theatre Club and Arena Stage (DC), New York Theatre Workshop, and Wagner Johnson Productions.
She has written for TV shows Pachinko (Apple TV) and Tales of the City (Netflix) and developed many things that never saw the light of day but still helped to support her vicious theatre habit.
Hansol is the recipient of the Lucille Lortel award for Best Play (Wolf Play), Obie Award for Playwriting, Herb Alpert Award, Steinberg Award, Whiting Award, Helen Merrill Award, Dramatists Guild Foundation Writers Alliance Grant, Princeton’s Hodder Fellowship, Page 73 Fellowship, Lark’s Rita Goldberg Fellowship, NYTW’s 2050 Fellowship, three-time MacDowell Fellowship. She has taught at various institutions including Yale School of Drama, Penn State University, Carnegie-Mellon, Wesleyan, SUNY, CUNY, Texas Tech University, and Phillips Exeter Academy. She is currently on the faculty at Boston University’s MFA Playwriting program.
Hansol is a proud member of NYTW’s Usual Suspects, an Alumna of the Kilroys, a Legacy Labbie of the Ma-Yi Writers Lab, and a founding member of the new play collective The Pack.
She has an MFA from Yale and Penn State University.
Before she found America, Hansol was a director and translator in Seoul, South Korea, where she translated 30+ shows from English to Korean for award-winning productions, including works such as Evita, Spamalot, All Shook Up, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, Baby!, The Story of Us, The Life, Evil Dead, and Frank Wildhorn’s Dracula. In her free time, she wonders if she had done all this work that people still use today not when she was still in her early 20s with zero knowledge about business, she would right now have more money.
Statement
I am very honored to be considered for the DG council. I’ve been on the receiving end of so many of the Guild’s benefits, and it is a special joy to think about how I might give back after years of taking the grants, the musical hall reservations, and free legal advice.
Several of my colleagues overseas have said that America is having her Golden Age of playwrights, despite the shit age of politicians. We will need some decades of history to comment on what Age this really is, but I have to say that the one amazing experience about being a writer for theatre in this country is that the civic community that supports the American playwright is disproportionately large and sturdy compared to the small and shaky infrastructures provided by her government. I was lucky to be whisked into this community soon after I wrote my first “End of Play” – I was whisked into the Lark (RIP), Ma-Yi, and of course, this Guild, who accepts anyone who is audacious enough to open a blank document and power through till they find their “End of Play.” The Guild whose mission it is to guide us through the joys, the pains, the legal and emotional rights of “being a playwright.” And I believe if there is a Golden Age of writing happening, it is built on the spine of artist-driven, not-for-profit, only-by-volition communities of writers rooting for Writing to happen.
My voice in the council would always err on the side of doubling down on this function of the Guild: through education initiatives, panels, and articles, creating an environment in which all dramatists—young and old, emerging and retiring, MFA’ed and not MFA’ed—are encouraged to keep writing for theatre in a country that tells them it’s not worth all that.
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