David Henry Hwang, Moderator
Speaker Bios
David Henry Hwang
David Henry Hwang is the author of M. Butterfly (1988 Tony, Drama Desk, Outer Critics awards, Pulitzer Prize finalist), Golden Child (1998 Tony nomination, 1997 OBIE Award), FOB (1981 OBIE Award), The Dance and the Railroad (Drama Desk nomination), Family Devotions (Drama Desk Nomination), Sound and Beauty, and Bondage. His newest play, Yellow Face, which premiered at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles and New York’s Public Theatre, won a 2008 OBIE Award, and was a finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize. He wrote the scripts for Elton John and Tim Rice’s Aida (co-author), Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Flower Drum Song (2002 revival, 2003 Tony nomination), and Disney’s Tarzan. A native of Los Angeles, Hwang serves on the Council of the Dramatists Guild. He attended Stanford University and Yale Drama School, and was appointed by President Clinton to the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities.
Bright Sheng
Bright Sheng is respected as one of the foremost composers of our time, and his stage, orchestral, chamber and vocal works are performed regularly throughout North America, Europe and Asia. Sheng’s music is noted for its lyrical and limpid melodies, a sense of breath in musical phrases that evokes Shostakovich, a Bartokian sense of rhythmic propulsion, and dramatic and theatrical gestures. Many of Sheng’s works have strong Chinese and Asian influences, a result of his diligent study of Asian musical cultures for over three decades. He was proclaimed by the MacArthur Foundation in 2001 as “an innovative composer who merges diverse musical customs in works that transcend conventional aesthetic boundaries.”
Jeff Yang
Jeff Yang founded and was editor and publisher of the pioneering Asian American periodical aMagazine for over a dozen years. He has written for a wide range of publications, from Spin to Vibe to Mademoiselle, and has been a columnist and featured contributor for the Village Voice, the anime/manga magazine Animerica, and the comics and gaming magazine Flux, as well as SFGate, the website of the San Francisco Chronicle, where he currently writes the biweekly column "Asian Pop." He has also written three books—Eastern Standard Time (Houghton Mifflin); I Am Jackie Chan: My Life in Action (Ballantine, the action icon's official autobiography); and Once Upon a Time in China (Atria/Pocket Books)—and can be seen on VH1 and heard as a special correspondent on New York's flagship NPR station, WNYC. He is editor-in-chief of Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology (New Press).
