Haruna Lee

Haruna Lee (born 1985 They moved from Japan to the United States when they were eight. They received an undergraduate degree from the Experimental Theatre Wing at Tisch School of the Arts NYU, and later received their graduate degree from Brooklyn College's MFA Playwriting Program under the mentorship of Mac Wellman and Erin Courtney.

As an experimental playwright, Lee created and performed in plural (love), a collaboration with Jen Goma and various artists, an auto-theoretical performance installation that flirts with the boundaries of desire, power, and responsibility, creating a performance piece that feels like stepping into a soft BDSM roleplay. Between 2016–2021, they developed the project with New Georges, the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab, and WP Pipeline Festival. In 2022, they premiered a short film with the same title. In 2016, Lee performed Communing with You with their mother, Aoi Lee. The 30-minute Butoh piece was performed at Brooklyn Arts Exchange.

Production of Suicide Forest at The Bushwick Starr, March 2019. Lee's most notable play, Suicide Forest, premiered in 2019 at The Bushwick Starr with Ma-Yi Theater Company and was directed by Aya Ogawa and was performed by Haruna Lee, alongside their mother Aoi Lee. It is an investigation of how Japanese suicide has symbolically permeated the playwright's identity, and received grants from the MAP Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council for the Arts. It was hailed by the New York Times as "Vivid, haunted, heart-stingingly tender and explicitly personal... A wild ride of a production and was a Critic's Pick. It received an Off-Broadway remount in 2020 with Ma-Yi Theater Company at A.R.T/NY and won an Obie Award in Playwriting and made The Kilroys List. In 2023, Lee was invited to join the New Dramatists' resident playwright company until 2030. Lee began developing their play 49 Days, a bilingual radio play about what's gained and what's lost when a family holds too tightly to their grief and rage, at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center's National Playwrights Conference in 2025, with previous workshops from New Dramatists, Playwrights Horizons, and Ma-Yi Theater Company. It is slated to premiere with the National Asian American Theater Company and New Georges in 2027. and a Mercury Store residency. In 2025, they won a Creative Capital Award for DADBOT.

Plays Troika Plum de Force Drunkfish Oceanrant Communing with You Suicide Forest War Lesbian to the left of the pantry and under the sugar shack Memory Retrograde DADBOT 49 Days

Filmography Television

Awards and nominations