Melisa Tien

Melisa Tien is a playwright, lyricist, and librettist invested in making formally unconventional, socially relevant, and emotionally evocative work. A resident of New Dramatists, she is the author of the plays Disrupted (First Light Festival, 2024), Best Life (JACK, 2021),Yellow Card, Red Card (Ice Factory Festival, 2017), The Last Mile, The Boyd Show, and Familium Vulgare; librettist of the operas Family-Style (Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, 2025), Undone (American Opera Projects, 2025), Forever (Washington National Opera, 2024), The Big Swim (Houston Grand Opera/Asia Society Texas Center, 2024), Song of the Nightingale (On Site Opera/Arts Brookfield, 2023), and The Beehive (University of Northern Iowa, 2023); lyricist for the song cycles Swell (HERE, 2021) and Daylight Saving; co-creator of the podcast/auditory experience Active Listening, and creator of the theatrical experiences Untitled Landscape and Community Forest. She has been published in the anthologies Theater Artists Making Theatre With No Theater (Tripwire Harlot Press, 2020) and Modern Music for New Singers: 21st Century American Art Songs (North Star Music, 2021), and has authored essays for New Music USA and Innovations in Socially Distant Performance. She is currently a librettist with Opera Theatre of Saint Louis’ New Works Collective, a librettist with the American Opera Project’s Composers & the Voice program, and a recent member of Washington National Opera’s American Opera Initiative, Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s Ground Floor Residency Lab, Experiments in Opera’s Writers’ Room, and The Assembly Theater Project’s Deceleration Lab. She earned a BA in English from UCLA, an MFA in Playwriting from Columbia University, and a culinary diploma from the French Culinary Institute.