Haruna Lee is an award-winning non binary Taiwanese-Japanese-American experimental playwright and theater maker, screenwriter, educator, and community steward based in Brooklyn, NY. Their plays are often an urge to honor their mother’s broken English, to translate experiences despite the gulf of cultures, to know their own psychic blood and guts, and to give up on words entirely and commune through epic imagery and ritual.
Lee’s recent works include DADBOT, a hybrid technology performance piece where they resurrect their dead dad using conversational AI to be in a simulation of the iconic father-child conversation. It was part of Berkeley Rep’s Ground Floor Residency in 2025 and the Mercury Store residency in 2026. 49 Days is a bilingual radio play exploring what’s lost and what’s gained when one family holds too tightly to their grief, delving into the unexpected consequences of language, legacy, and what’s left unsaid. It was part of the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s National Playwrights Conference 2025 with previous workshops at New Dramatists, Playwrights Horizons, and Ma-Yi Theatre Company, and is slated to have it’s world premiere with NAATCO and New Georges in 2027. Suicide Forest, hailed by the New York Times as "Vivid, haunted, heart-stingingly tender and explicitly personal...A wild ride of a production" (NYT Critic’s Pick). It was directed by Aya Ogawa and was performed by Lee and their mother Aoi Lee. The play is an investigation of how Japanese suicide has symbolically permeated the playwright's transcultural and social identities, and received a world premiere at The Bushwick Starr in 2019, with an Off-Broadway remount in 2020 with Ma-Yi Theater Company, making The Kilroys List that year. plural (love), a collaboration between Lee and Jen Goma, is an auto-theoretical performance installation that flirts with the boundaries of desire, power, and responsibility, building an environment that feels akin to stepping into a soft BDSM roleplay. It has been developed by New Georges (2016-2017),the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab (2017-2019) and WP Pipeline Festival (2021-2022) where Lee and Goma created a short film of the same title.
Lee is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship (2026), the Creative Capital Award for DADBOT (2026), the NYSCA Artist Grant Award for a commission with Hoi Polloi (2026), the Susan Smith Blackburn Special Commendation for 49 Days (2025), the Hermitage Fellowship (2024-2026), the Steinberg Playwright Award (2021), the Obie Award in Playwriting for the Conception and Writing of Suicide Forest (2019), for which they received grants from The MAP Fund (2018), the National Endowment for the Arts (2019), and the New York State Council of the Arts (2019). Lee has been recognized with The Bret Adams & Paul Reisch Foundation Ollie New Play Award (2021), FCA Grants to Artists Award (2021), the Mohr Visiting Artist Fellowship at Stanford University (2020-2021), the MacDowell Fellowship, including the Keith Haring Fellowship (2020/2021), the Lotos Foundation Prize for Theater Directing (2017), and a New Dramatists Van Lier Playwriting Fellowship (2010). They are a current member of New Dramatists (2023-2030), and the co-founder and lead facilitator of the Women-Trans-Femme-Non Binary (WTFNB) Asian Diasporic Performance Makers Potluck. They currently serve as the co-chair of the American Theatre Wing’s Obie Awards (2023-2025) and served as a judge from 2021-2023. They have been a member of the 2020-2022 WP Theater Lab, the 2019 artEquity National Facilitator Training cohort, the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab, the Public’s Devised Theater Working Group, P73 Interstate 73 Writer’s Group, and has held residencies and commissions with Ars Nova Maker’s Lab, Brooklyn Arts Exchange Artist-in-Residence, Dixon Place Mondo Cane! Commission & Residency, and the Bushwick Starr Propeller Project Series. They have also received development opportunities with Drop Forge and Tool, Space on Ryder Farm, Little Theater, Prelude Festival, York College, Food For Thought/Danspace, Target Margin Lab Series, and Asian American Writer’s Workshop.
Their writing has been published by Broadway Licensing in a commission of scenes and monologues by TNB2S+ artists titled Bliss, Yale’s Theater Magazine (2023), by Table Work Press in the anthology Plays For Our Younger Selves (2020), and 53rd State Press including Suicide Forest (2019) and in Occasional No. 2 (2018).
As a performer and writing collaborator, Lee has worked with Lynn Nottage and Vanessa German on The Watering Hole (Signature Theatre), Aya Ogawa on The Nosebleed (Japan Society), Mac Wellman on The Offending Gesture (The Tank), with David Lang & Rachel Chavkin on Little Match Girl Passion (Met Breur), Cesar Alvarez’s Futurity (Soho Rep & Ars Nova, Lortel Award 2016), Great Lakes with Kate Benson & Lee Sunday Evans (New Georges & City Center, Obie Winner 2015), Andrea Geyer’s 2012 Whitney Biennial Comrades of Time, Taylor Mac’s The Lily’s Revenge (HERE, Obie Winner 2010), NAATCO, Minor Theater, The Drunkard’s Wife, Ralph Lee and the Mettawee River Theater Co., and Anohni- among others.
They teach at Yale University and Hunter College in the MFA Playwriting Programs.
harunalee.com // photo by Sasha Arutyunova