Photograph taken by Heather Sen.
[Image description: Haruna’s face, bathed in natural light, stands out against a dark, green background. Haruna, with black hair, brown eyes, and “winged” eyeliner, is looking upward and towards the viewer’s left. Their right hand is dramatically positioned, with the back of their hand against their forehead.]
Haruna Lee (they/them)
www.harunalee.com
![[Haruna, a Taiwanese-Japanese person, sits in a Brooklyn backyard in a sage-green suit, leaning back with their left hand perched on their knee. They are looking off in the distance to their right (our left), and are sitting under the shade of a tree, which throws beautiful light across their face and body, and the stone wall behind them. They are shirtless, the middle of their bare chest exposed between the sides of the unbuttoned suit.]Photo taken by Heather Sen](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/607b10ca2bb5706ee3efdd18/1624312282030-UQ3S0L26QFFBHSNXXF6A/200516_NYT_HarunaLee_43.jpeg)
[Haruna, a Taiwanese-Japanese person, sits in a Brooklyn backyard in a sage-green suit, leaning back with their left hand perched on their knee. They are looking off in the distance to their right (our left), and are sitting under the shade of a tree, which throws beautiful light across their face and body, and the stone wall behind them. They are shirtless, the middle of their bare chest exposed between the sides of the unbuttoned suit.]
Photo taken by Heather Sen
Artist Statement
Haruna Lee is an award-winning Taiwanese-Japanese-American theater maker, screenwriter, educator, and community steward whose work is rooted in a liberation-based healing practice. Their plays are often portals into personal and collective stories navigating transcultural experiences and memories, and the conflicts that arise when dealing with the simultaneity, contradictions and pluralities of self. Through their artistic modalities and teaching, they promote arts activism and emergent strategies for the theater through ethical and process-based collaborations that challenge coloniality and legacies of power, while inviting the fullness of marginalized bodies and the complexity of that lived experience to this practice.
Since 2010, Lee has created six original works with their company harunalee, which lovingly disbanded in 2020. Learn more about the company here.
Lee’s works include 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) directed by Aya Ogawa, 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. plural (love), a collaboration between Lee, Jen Goma, and Morgan Green, 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) and the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab (2017-2019) and will have its world premiere with New Georges. Memory Retrograde, an exploration of one couple’s past-life regressions through vast expanses of generations and landscapes revealing how memory and trauma is racialized, gendered, and fallible over time, was developed at Brooklyn Arts Exchange (2015-2017), Ars Nova Maker’s Lab (2017), and was produced by harunalee and Ars Nova as part of The Public’s Under The Radar Festival Incoming! Series (2018).
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Through my plays, I have been developing a poetics that gives voice to and examines themes and ideas I’ve been drawn to all my life; these themes are a collision of images that extend towards personal and collective liberation- of truths and riddles that perplex and bring into light the fragmented experiences of Asian American / Immigrant / Queer & Non Binary bodies, life and death as literal and metaphorical events, the pluralities of sex & desire, and the intersection of psychic experience that ruptures our daily rituals and process of healing. For me, to write a play or performance text is to create radical landscapes that are a visual collage, always offering a space for our sacred mess to pan out while formulating my own sense of play-logic. I strive to create theater that honors the complex, the multiple, the layered intersectionality of our being while tapping into non-linear form and liminal spaces to meditate on the more spectacular, terrifying and disruptive bodies of thought and energy that exist in our deeper spirit and subconscious.
I am committed to organizing arts activism that engages my theater community with ‘ethical collaborations’, promoting the responsibility of individual artists, institutions, and companies working together to create a more equitable, inclusive, and transparent practice that begins by holding one another accountable. You can find harunalee’s statement on equity and ethical collaborations here.
[biography written by the narrator, Haruna.]