Chiori Miyagawa

Chiori Miyagawa is a NYC-based playwright and a resident playwright at New Dramatists. Her plays vary in subject and style, yet they all bear a unique signature—always theatrical, with elements of magic realism; time is often collapsed, and they consistently revolve around a theme of memory and identity.

Chiori’s plays have been produced off-Broadway (Vineyard Theatre, New York Theatre Workshop, Women's Project, Culture Project), at renowned performance houses in NYC (HERE Arts Center, Performance Space 122, Ohio Theater) and regionally. A collection of seven of her plays, Thousand Years Waiting and Other Plays, is published by Seagull Books; and another collection of five plays, America Dreaming and Other Plays is published by NoPassport Press.

She is a recipient of many fellowships including a New York Foundation for the Arts Playwriting Fellowship, a McKnight Playwriting Fellowship, a Van Lier Playwriting Fellowship, an Asian Cultural Council Fellowship, a Rockefeller Bellagio Residency Fellowship, and a Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellowship at Harvard University.

She has been fortunate to be granted a private audience with the Dalai Lama while she was writing Broken Morning; and be able to relocate to Philadelphia for three weeks in 2008 to work for the Obama Campaign.

Her upcoming projects include: I came to look for you on Tuesday at LaMama ETC, This Lingering Life at Theatre of Yugen in San Francisco. She is collaborating with renowned psychologist Thomas Joiner on the project titled The Drop.

She is a member of Lark Play Development Center and a Usual Suspect of New York Theatre Workshop. She teaches playwriting at Bard College where she created an undergraduate playwriting program under the chair JoAnne Akalaitis.

Photo: Jennifer May

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