Stefani Kuo
Playwright
Stefani Kuo, 郭佳怡 (Playwright) is a poet, playwright, performer, and native of Hong Kong and Taiwan. She received her BA from Yale and is an MFA Playwriting Candidate at the Yale School of Drama. Fluent in Cantonese, Mandarin, French, and English, she is interested in crafting multicultural, multilingual narratives for an international audience. She has been an awardee of the Jerome Fellowship at PWC, Dramatist Guild Fellowship, finalist for the National Playwrights Conference, Jerome fellowship at Lanesboro Arts Centre, Many Voices Fellowship at PWC, the Working Farm with SPACE on Ryder Farm, Van Lier New Voices Fellowship, NAP Series, DVRF Playwrights' Program, BRIC Lab, semi-finalist for the Page 73 Playwriting Fellowship, Princess Grace Fellowship, Ground Floor at Berkeley Rep, Local Lab 11, Scratchpad Series at Playwrights Realm. Her play, Architecture of Rain, premiered at the Iseman Theatre at Yale, which received a reading in the DVRF Roundtable and Checkmark Theatre Company series. She has received commissions from the Rubin Museum, Round House Theatre Teen Performance Company, and Yangtze Repertory Theater Company. Her play, delicacy of a puffin heart, was produced with the 2018 Corkscrew Theatre Festival and The Parsnip Ship. Her play on the Hong Kong protests, Final Boarding Call, was the winner of the 2021 Lead Ryan Fund for Emerging Women Writers’ Prize, a semi-finalist for Barrington Stage’ Company’s Burman New Play Award and the O’Neill’s National Playwrights Conference. It was presented as a virtual reading, co-produced by WP and Ma-Yi Theater Company, in March 2021, and was workshopped as a part of the 2020 Bay Area Playwrights Festival at Playwrights Foundation and the 2020 Irons in the Fire Series with Faultline Theater Company. The Conservation of Parity, her play on the work of Dr. Wu Chien-Shiung, the only Chinese woman to work on the Manhattan Project, was workshopped and co-presented by the Kitchen and Ma-Yi Theater Company in March 2021. It was a finalist for Egg and Spoon’s 2021 Incubation series, and semi-finalist for Local Lab Theater Company’s 2021 Developmental Series. She most recently presented a reading of her play, Little Stubby Wings, Like She Could’ve Glued Them On, with Bedlam Theater Company in October 2021. She was a member of Interstate-73, Page 73’s Writers Group, in 2019. Her work in creative non-fiction, poetry, and translation has appeared in The New York Times, China Hands, Yale Literary Magazine, and more. Her poetry has been displayed as an installation piece, as part of Berlin Art Week 2017, at the Centre of Substructured Loss. She is represented by Jacob Epstein at Lighthouse Management. StefaniKuo.com; For more on Hong Kong: Parachute.Substack.com