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 bear a unique signature—always theatrical, often with elements of magic realism; time is repeatedly collapsed, and they consistently revolve around a theme of memory and identity. She enjoys traveling in time and space in her life and in her plays. She interviewed men on death row in Huntsville, TX (Broken Morning, supported by TCG’s Extended Collaboration Grant and Dallas Theater Center); traveled to Bath, England, where the first recognized woman astronomer lived in the 18th century (Comet Hunter, supported by the EST/Alfred P. Sloan Commission); and explored life in Chekhov’s Russia (Leaving Eden, commissioned by The Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University).

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 forthcoming from NoPassport Press.

She is a recipient of many fellowships including a NYFA 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 is the head of the undergraduate playwriting program at Bard College under the theater department chair, director JoAnne Akalaitis.

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