HARUNA LEE (TAPS MOHR VISITING ARTIST 20-21) is a Taiwanese-Japanese-American theater maker whose artistic process is rooted in a liberation-based healing practice. Their plays are often portals into personal and collective stories navigating transcultural experiences and memories, as well as conflicts that arise when grappling with the simultaneity, contradictions and pluralities of those lived experiences. Through different artistic and teaching modalities, they promote arts activism and emergent strategies for the theater through process-based collaborations that directly challenge coloniality and legacies of power. Between 2010-2019, Lee helmed the work of their company harunalee, an ensemble of theater makers and designers who created experimental plays and performances written and directed by Lee. With an eye for handmade and craft objects, they often created epic visual landscapes and immersive environments together. Lee’s standalone play Suicide Forest (Bushwick Starr & Ma-Yi Theater Company) was published by 53rd State Press and 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) and appeared on New York Magazine/Vulture’s top 10 shows of 2019. Other plays include plural (love) (New Georges, Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab), and Memory Retrograde (The Public’s Under the Radar Festival Incoming! Series, Ars Nova Makers Lab, Brooklyn Arts Exchange). Lee is a recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship, A Map Fund grant, Lotos Foundation Prize for Directing, a New Dramatists Van Lier Fellowship, and has received support from the Mental Insight Foundation, FCA, NYSCA, and the NEA. As a performer, they’ve worked with Aya Ogawa, Minor Theater, The Drunkard’s Wife, Taylor Mac, Mac Wellman, Rachel Chavkin, César Alvarez, Kate Benson & Lee Sunday Evans, and Anohni- among many others. They were a member of the 2019 artEquity cohort, a national facilitation training for artists and activists. Lee has taught playwriting and performance at the Experimental Theater Wing and Playwrights Horizons at NYU, PACE, CUNY, and Abrons Arts Center. They received their MFA from Brooklyn College for Playwriting, and a BFA from NYU Tisch Experimental Theater Wing. harunalee.com