The Labbies

Michael Lew (Lab Co-Director) His plays include microcrisis (NYC premiere with Ma-Yi); Stockton (Ensemble Studio Theatre workshop, NYC); People’s Park (Victory Gardens Ignition Festival, Chicago); Yit, Ngay (published in Plays and Playwrights 2006); Neanderthal Love (Sloan commission); Bury the Iron Horse; and Paper Gods. His shorts include Tenure (24 Hour Plays on Broadway); Roanoke (Humana Festival, Louisville); In Paris You Will Find Many Baguettes but Only One True Love (Humana Festival, Louisville; InspiraTO Festival Winner, Toronto); Moustache Guys (Second Generation, NYC); The Roosevelt Cousins, Thoroughly Sauced (Sam French Festival winner); and Magician Ben Vs. The Wizard Merlin (published by Smith & Kraus). He is a Heideman Award winner and a four-time finalist four years in a row, and as Ma-Yi’s representative he won the 2007 Battle of the Bards. Several of his short plays are published by Playscripts. Other residencies include Youngblood (Ensemble Studio Theatre), Second Generation, Old Vic New Voices, and TCG Young Leaders of Color. Yale College 2003. Check out his website at mikelew.com.

Rehana Mirza (Lab Co-Director) is currently the better half of Michael Lew, as the better co-director of the Ma-Yi Writer’s Lab. Her full-length plays include Barriers (HERE; Asian American Theater Company, SF); The Good Muslim (Theater Row); Radio Diaries of Hank, Yank, & Prank; Particles of Pakistan (Sloan commission); if it's sad i don't want to see it (O'Neill Finalist)and Lonely Leela. Honors include being the 2010 IAAC playwright in residence at The Lark Development Center, a 2008-2010 TCG Future Leader fellow with New Georges, a Leopold Schepp scholar, a 2G Resident Artist, LMCC artist grantee, John Golden Award winner, Princess Grace finalist, and a Sundance Feature Film Lab finalist. She is the co-founder and Artistic Director of Desipina & Co. Her film work as writer/director includes the short film MODERN DAY ARRANGED MARRIAGE (playing in over thirty festivals Internationally and the winner of the audience award at NBC’s Diversecity Short Cuts Festival) and HIDING DIVYA, a feature film starring Madhur Jaffrey, Pooja Kumar and Deep Katdare, which premiered theatrically in six cities nationwide in August 2010. MFA: Columbia University; BFA: Dramatic Writing, NYU Tisch.

Michi Barall is really thrilled to be part of the Ma-Yi’s Writers Lab. She is mostly an actor and has appeared in two Ma-Yi productions: Han Ong's Middle Finger, and Sung Rno's wAve. As an actor, she has worked predominantly on new plays by writers including Philip Kan Gotanda, John Guare, Naomi Iizuka, Han Ong, Jose Rivera, Sung Rno, Paul Rudnick, Charles Mee, Sarah Schulman, Anna Deavere Smith, Diana Son, Chay Yew. She is currently studying playwriting with Tina Howe at Hunter. She is a graduate of Stanford and NYU's Grad Acting and hopes to finish her second Master's in theatre history and criticism at Hunter this Spring.






J.P. Chan is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker and playwright. His short films have screened at film festivals throughout North America. His plays have been produced and/or read at Desipina, Ma-Yi, Peeling, Raw Impressions, Metropolitan Playhouse, Queens Theatre in the Park, and Chicago Dramatists. He studied urban planning at NYU and was born in New Jersey to working-class immigrant parents.

Samantha Chanse's plays and performances have been presented with Second Generation, New York International Fringe Festival, The National Asian American Theater Conference, The Marsh, Asian American Theater Company (AATC), PlayGround in Residence at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Bowery Poetry Club, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Kearny Street Workshop (KSW), and others. She is the recipient of an Individual Artist Commission from the San Francisco Arts Commission, an Artist In Motion residency from Footloose/Shotwell Studio, and an Emerging Artists Residency from Tofte Lake Center. A former member playwright of AATC’s Incubator program and PlayGround’s writers pool, she joined the Ma-Yi Writers Lab last fall. She co-founded and organizes multidisciplinary&bicoastal salon series Laundry Party, and served as artistic directors of San Francisco-based arts nonprofits Kearny Street Workshop and Locus Arts. She is currently pursuing a MFA in playwriting while teaching undergraduate writing at Columbia University. Her first solo play, Lydia's Funeral Video, is forthcoming from Kaya Press. More information at www.samanthachanse.com.

Nora Chau is a former ABC/Disney New Talent grant recipient and current member of the Ma-Yi Writers Lab. Her past works have been produced way off-Broadway and for the small screen.

Carla Ching - Born and raised in Los Angeles, Carla Ching wrote and performed with pan-Asian performance troupe Peeling for a number of years. Her plays include TBA, Big Blind/Little Blind, The Sugar House at the Edge of the Wilderness and Fast Company. Her work has been workshopped or produced by Ma-Yi Theater Company, Ensemble Studio Theatre (EST/Sloan Commission), The Lark Play Development Center, The Women's Project, Desipina & Company, Vampire Cowboys, Red Fern Theater Company, Partial Comfort and others. 2008 Urban Artists Initiative Fellow, 2009/10 Teachers & Writers Collaborative Fellow, 2010/11 Lark Play Development Center Playwrights Workshop Fellow. Member of the Ma-Yi Writers Lab and alum of the 2008-2010 Women's Project Lab. TBA is published in Out of Time and Place. BA, Vassar College. MFA, New School for Drama. She is artistic director of 2g.

Dustin Chinn began his stage career with The Northwest Asian American Theater, ReAct Theater Workshop, the 11:07 late night comedy series and Pork Filled Players sketch group. He was a member of the Peeling performance collective, curator of the Lemonade reading series and director of Stolen Cow Productions in New York City. Dustin has studied longform improvisation at the Peoples Improv Theater and Magnet Theater.

Mia Chung is also a member of the Civilians’ R&D Group. As a 2010 Inkwell finalist, she is having a developmental showcase of her play You for Me for You in Inkwell’s Fall Festival at Woolly Mammoth Theatre. Her play Cape Verde will be presented in Spring 2011 at Rites and Reason Theatre. Her play Exquisite Corpse was a 2010 PlayPenn finalist. Her work has been developed by the Magic Theatre, the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Mu Performing Arts, the Brandeis Theatre Company, and PlayGround in San Francisco. She received a Sloan commission and a Creative Arts Council grant; she also had a residency at the Millay Colony. She has an MFA in playwriting from Brown.

Patricia Jang's plays include Artifact, An Atomic Life, Westward, Aboveboard, Counterspace, The Fix, and Next Paris. Her plays have been performed at New York Theatre Workshop, New York University, Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival, Speaking Ring Theatre, HERE, Chicago Dramatists, Women's Theatre Alliance, and Theatre Limina. Mood Indigo, Patricia's first screenplay, won the Best Graduate Screenplay award at the Fusion Film Festival. Awards include the 2006-07 playwriting fellowship at New York Theatre Workshop, a Donahue Tremaine Residuary grant, the Harry Kondoleon Graduate Award in Playwriting and an Illinois Arts Council fellowship in playwriting. BA: Smith College; MFA: New York University.

Mrinalini Kamath's plays have been performed around the country as well as the United Kingdom, Australia and India. She was a semi-finalist for both the 2006 O'Neill and Seven Devils Playwrights Conferences and was Fluid Motion Theatre and Film's inaugural Start the Story Commission recipient (2006). She won first place in the 2005 East West Players (Los Angeles, CA) "Got Laughs?" Asian-American Comedy Play Contest, was a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the 2003 Sewanee Writers' Conference in Sewanee, TN, and a finalist for the 2004 Jerome Fellowship at the Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis, MN. Three of her short plays have been work-shopped at the New Play Development Workshop of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education and several have been published in the Smith and Kraus anthologies, Best Stage Scenes of 1999, Best Stage Scenes of 2000, The Best Ten Minute Plays for 3 or More Actors, 2004 and the upcoming The Best Ten Minute Plays for Two Actors, 2007. She has also been published by playscripts.com. She is an alumnus of Youngblood, the emerging playwrights' collective at the Ensemble Studio Theatre, the Ma-Yi Theatre Writers Lab, the Dramatists Guild and a Dramatists Guild representative to the board of the New York Coallition for Professional Women in the Arts and Media (NYCWAM). B.A.: The Writing Seminars, Johns Hopkins University M.F.A.: Dramatic Arts, concentration in playwriting, The New School for Drama. www.mkwriter.com.

Jon Kern - Graduate: University of Chicago and Columbia University’s School of the Arts. Member: Ars Nova Play Group, The Old Vic New Voices Network, and the Ma-Yi Writers Lab; alumnus of EST/Youngblood. Awards: 2010-2011 Van Lier Fellowship in Playwriting from New Dramatists, 2010 Alfred P. Sloan Commission, 2010 Heideman Finalist.

Edgar Mendoza’s play Blue Note Run was awarded the Kennedy Center’s inaugural Paul Stephen Lim Asian-American Playwriting Award. The prize included a Lark Play Development Center residency at New York Stage & Film. Edgar was also a Dramatists Guild Playwriting Fellow, where he began developing his play, A World on Display. Moreover, he received a Love of Learning Award from the Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society to further his research on the 1904 Saint Louis World’s Fair, the setting for A World on Display. His other plays, Old Man Nature, Dead Love Triangle, Amnestia, Lion Plaza and All The Earth have received staged readings and workshop productions in Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, and San Jose. Edgar graduated from Carnegie Mellon University, with an M.F.A. in Dramatic Writing, where he was a two-time recipient of the Shubert Foundation Fellowship. His screenplay, The Unifying Theory, was awarded the $10,000 prize in the Alfred P. Sloan Screenplay Competition, and he also won the opportunity to attend the American Film Institute-Sloan Film Summit in Hollywood. Edgar is thankful to be a member of the Ma-Yi Writers Lab, Leviathan Lab, and Dramatists Guild of America.

Don Nguyen studied theatre at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and served as Artistic Director of the Shelterbelt Theatre from 1999-2003. Don’s full-length plays include Red Flamboyant (O’Neill and Bay Area Playwrights finalist) and Three To Beam Up (The Shelterbelt Theatre, Nebraska Arts Grant). His one-act play The Harlequin Maneuver was published in The Best of The Strawberry One-Act Festival, Volume 1 and has subsequently been produced in New York and Canada. Other one act plays include Fat Ugly Vampire (Nuyorican Poets Cafe), The Imaginary Association Of Flight Attendants (Nuyorican Poets Cafe), Love 160 (The Pack Lounge Series 3, Robert Moss Theater, NY), The Dragon Lord And The Fairy Queen (commissioned by The Lincoln Community Playhouse) and a collection of eight Halloween plays produced by The Shelterbelt Theatre. Other writing credits include The Living Newspaper Workshop where he wrote several one acts for Google Rising. Other short plays and monologues include Cello, Goodbye (14: Instant Vaudeville, 2G), Sexual Chocolate (The Secret Theatre), Girl Reflected and Look, A Lion (Emerging Writers Retreat). Don is a member of the Public Theater’s 2008 Inaugural Emerging Writers Group, The Ma-Yi Writers Lab and The Civilians R & D Group. Website:www.thenuge.com

Qui Nguyen is a Co-Artistic Director of the OBIE Award-winning Vampire Cowboys. His scripts include The Inexplicable Redemption of Agent G; Soul Samurai; Alice in Slasherland; Fight Girl Battle World; Men of Steel; Living Dead in Denmark; Trial By Water; Stained Glass Ugly; A Beginner's Guide to Deicide; Vampire Cowboy Trilogy; Bike Wreck; Aliens Versus Cheerleaders; and the hip-hop musical Krunk Fu Battle Battle. He is a proud resident playwright of New Dramatists, an alumnus of Youngblood, and a current member of the Ma-Yi Writers Lab and Ensemble Studio Theatre.

Eugene Oh's Say Anything Do Anything… was originally presented at Austin's FronteraFest Fringe Festival and was nominated in 2007 by the Texas Circle of Theaters for an Iden B. Payne Award. In 2005, he was awarded Dartmouth College's Eleanor Frost Playwrighting Award. Eugene is a graduate of Dartmouth College and the National Theater Institute at The Eugene O'Neill Theater Center.

A. Rey Pamatmat is the 2010 Princess Grace Fellow for Playwriting. His play Edith Can Shoot Things and Hit Them, first developed in the Ma-Yi Writer's Lab, will have its world premiere next spring at the Humana Festival, where he is also co-writing the anthology play The End. Rey's other full-length plays have been produced by Second Generation (Thunder Above, Deeps Below) and the Vortex Theatre Company (DEVIANT), and his shorts have been produced by Actors' Theatre of Louisville (Ain't Meat and 1,260 Minute Life in the 2007 anthology play The Open Road), Vampire Cowboys (Red Rover), and HERE (High/Limbo/High). Development: Ma-Yi, the O'Neill, New Work Now! at The Public, Victory Garden's Ignition Festival, Playwrights' Horizons, NNPN's National Showcase of New Plays, Ars Nova, Rattlestick, E.S.T., The Lark, New Dramatists, and the National Asian American Theatre Conference. Commissions: Actors' Theatre of Louisville, E.S.T./Sloan, Mabou Mines, Second Generation, and Vampire Cowboys. Rey has been a NYFA Playwriting Fellow, an artist-delegate to the first U.S. Social Forum, and a Truman Capote Literary Fellow. Other plays: Beautiful Day, New, Picture 24, and Pure. B.F.A.: NYU, Drama. M.F.A.: Yale School of Drama, Playwriting.

Kyoung H. Park is a Korean-Chilean playwright, author of Sex and Hunger, disOriented, Heartbreak/India, The Diamond Trade, and many short plays including Mina. His work has been presented by the Ensemble Studio Theater, Vital Theater, Ma-Yi Theater, Diverse City Theater, Access Theater, La Mama ETC, 2G, and the Royal Court Theater in London. Kyoung is recipient of an Edward Albee Playwriting Fellowship, Theater of the Oppressed Exchange Fellowship, Global Arts Village Fellowship, grants from the Princess Grace, Arvon, and GK foundations, and a 2010 UNESCO-Aschberg award. Kyoung is proud member of Ma-Yi Theater’s Writer’s Lab, Ensemble Studio Theater’s Youngblood, and Soho Theater’s Hub. BFA: Dramatic Writing, NYU; MA: Peace and Global Governance, KHU. Former Visiting Professor at Kyung Hee University’s School of English Language and Culture, Kyoung is currently a Dean’s Fellow at Columbia University’s MFA program in playwriting.

Sung Rno's plays include wAve, Behind the Masq, Weather, Cleveland Raining, Gravity Falls From Trees, Drizzle and Other Stories, Yi Sang Counts to Thirteen, and The Trajectory of a Heart, Fractured. His work has been produced by East West Players, Thick Description, Asian American Theater Company, North West Asian American Theater, San Diego Asian American Rep, Dance Theater Workshop, Immigrants' Theater Project, Seoul International Theater Festival, New York Fringe Festival, Sanctuary, Second Generation, Changgo Theater (Seoul), Yellow Earth Theater (London), and Ma-Yi Theater. Honors include an NEA/TCG playwriting fellowship (residency with Ma-Yi Theater Company), the Whitfield Cook Prize, a New York Fringe Festival Best Overall Production Award, 2 Van Lier Fellowships (with New Dramatists and New York Theater Workshop), and first prize in the Seattle Multicultural Playwrights' Festival. He wrote the screenplay for the short film Crumple, which won the First 64 Hour Film Shootout, and has been a finalist for the Heideman Award. His plays and poetry are anthologized in Ma-Yi's "Savage Stage; Manifesto Series 1 ed. by Erik Ehn; But Still, Like Air, I'll Rise; Premonitions; Echoes Upon Echoes and The Nuyorasian Anthology. Sung’s current projects include Happy, commissioned by Second Stage and Time Warner; Galois, commissioned by EST/Sloan Foundation; and a screenplay. A founder of the Ma-Yi Writers’ Lab, Sung holds a BA from Harvard, an MFA from Brown, and is a recent graduate of New Dramatists.

Maureen Sebastian - This is Maureen's first year with the Ma-Yi Writers Lab as she has been primarily pursuing an acting career. In her first year in NYC, having graduated with a BFA in Theatre Performance from the University of Michigan's School of Music, she's worked with Emerging Artists, Vampire Cowboys Theatre Company, The Flea Theatre, Gorgeous Entertainment, and the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey. She is a recipient of Columbia University's J.R. Humphreys Fellowship in Writing and is currently working on a one-woman show.

Nandita Shenoy is a writer-actor-director living in New York City. Her one-act plays Marrying Nandini, By Popular Demand, and Rules of Engagement have received full productions in New York City from Green Light Productions, New Perspectives Theater, and New Ground Collective respectively. Her full-length play, Lyme Park: An Austonian Romance of an Indian Nature, will receive a workshop production at The Round House in Silver Spring, MD, produced by theHegira. Her plays have been read at the Kennedy Center, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Salaam Theater, the Bleecker Street Theater, The Lark Play Development Center, and by the Red Harlem Readers. She is on the Board of Directors for Rising Circle Theater Collective and serves as a committee chair for the South Asian Theater Arts Movement. Nandita holds a Bachelors Degree in English literature with a distinction in the major from Yale University.

Lloyd Suh served as Co-Director of the Lab from 2006-2010, and currently serves as Onsite Program Director at the Lark Play Development Center. His plays include American Hwangap, The Children of Vonderly, Happy End of the World, Jesus in India, Great Wall Story and others, produced with Ma-Yi, The Play Company, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Magic Theatre (SF), East West Players (LA), and internationally at the Cultural Center of the Philippines. He has been a recipient of an NEA Arena Stage New Play Development grant, an Andrew W. Mellon Launching New Plays Into the Repertoire grant via the Lark, and fellowships from the New York State Council on the Arts, New York Foundation of the Arts, Jerome Foundation, Theatre Communications Group and the Dramatists Guild.

Susan Soon He Stanton plays include American Pig Pen (New Century Theatre Company workshop and Astor Street Oprey New Works Festival), Cygnus (Inkwell workshop), Furball (Second Generation commission), and the things are against us (Yale’s Carlotta Festival and RoAn workshop). Kumu Kahua produced two of her plays in rep, Whatever Happened to John Boy Kihano? and remounted their production of Art of Preservation. She was awarded the Hawai'i prize and the Pacific Rim Prize by Kumu Kahua. The Underneath, commissioned by Kumu Kahua, originated at the Yale Cabaret, and was workshopped at the Kennedy Center and the Unicorn Theater. Susan is Honolulu Theatre for Youth’s (HTY) resident playwright for their 2010-11 season. HTY commissioned her to write Navigator and Where Do Things Go? (multi-writer play). Edible Restaurant, a musicalwith composer Greta Gertler (Joe’s Pub performance), was a commission from New Sounds Theatre. Susan received a feature-film development grant and best screenplay award from the Sloan Foundation. BFA: NYU Tisch Dramatic Writing. MFA: Yale School of Drama. She is a member of SoHo Rep Writer-Director Lab and a Lark Van Lier Fellow. She is from Honolulu, Hawai'i.