About the Playwright: Lee Cataluna

she/her

Lee Cataluna’s play, Heart Strings, received a reading at NYU Steinhardt, was workshopped at Northwestern University and produced at Atlantic Theater off Broadway in 2022. She was awarded the ReImagine Grant from TYA/USA in 2021 to support her work in theater for family audiences. Current commissions include Royal School for Honolulu Theatre for Youth, the national BIPOC Superhero project, Emalani for Arena Stage, and Sons of Maui for San Francisco Playhouse, which was a Eugene O’Neill 2023 finalist. She was commissioned by La Jolla Playhouse to write Home of the Brave for the 2018 POP Tour. Her play Flowers of Hawaii was produced at Kumu Kahua, the University of Hawaii and workshopped at Native Voices in Los Angeles, Out of the Box Theatrics in NYC, and Chautauqua Institute. She was one of eight writers, along with Sarah Ruhl, Dael Orlandersmith and Eve Ensler, of the piece My Body No Choice which played in 30 theaters across the country in 2022. She was part of the inaugural Oregon Shakespeare Festival Indigenous Playwrights Cohort, and has taught writing workshops for Yale, Punahou Academy, and Saguaro Prison in Arizona. She is of Native Hawaii heritage and has an MFA in Creative Writing from UC Riverside.