Brenda Wong Aoki

Brenda Wong Aoki has broken barriers and established a new artistic genre as a contemporary American storyteller. Her work is a synthesis of Japanese Noh and Kyogen theater, Commedia dell'arte, modern dance and every day experience. A writer and performer, she is acclaimed as one of America's foremost solo theater performers. From the New Victory Theatre on Broadway in New York City, to the Graz Erzahlt in Austria, to Sapporo, Japan, Brenda Wong Aoki has established a new genre as a contemporary storyteller.

From the New Victory Theatre on Broadway in New York City, to the Graz Erzahlt in Austria, to Sapporo, Japan, Brenda Wong Aoki has established a new genre as a contemporary storyteller.Awriter, performer, and recording artist, she has received numerous grants, fellowships and commissions for her original work. Of Chinese, Japanese, Spanish and Scots descent, her stories blend myth, streetlore, and real life. These dramatic presentations synthesize Kyogen & Noh (Japanese traditional theater), modern dance, and live jazz.

Her latest work, Kuan-Yin, Our Lady of Compassion premiered in November 2002 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco). Uncle Gunjiro's Girlfriend(1998, revised 2007), commissioned by a U.S. Congressional Grant (U.S. Civil Liberties Public Education Fund) is the true story of Aoki's grand-uncle's love affair and subsequent marriage to a white woman which sparked the anti-Asian miscegenation laws of the early 1900's. Her other works include: Mermaid(1997) ? commissioned by Maestro Kent Nagano and the Berkeley Symphony with music composed by Mark Izu, The Queen's Garden (Routledge Press 1996), won four Dramalogue awards for Best Original Music, Writing, Performance and Lighting as well as a Critics Circle Award, Random Acts (1994), Obake! Some Japanese Ghosts, and Tales of the Pacific Rim. She has been awarded commissions and fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (Tokyo Form and Spirit Exhibition) and the Asian Art Museum (Myths and Rebuses).

Aoki was named one of the 500 most influential Asian Americans by Avenue Magazine (1996) and received a 1998 Golden Ring Award from the Asian American Arts Foundation. She received the 1998 Innovative Composition award from ASCAP(The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers), the US Pan Asian Chamber of Commerce Excellence 2000 Award (Washington, DC), the 1996 Woman Warrior Award (San Francisco), 1996 National Storytelling Championship, and she was the sole artist selected by the Smithsonian to perform before the 1996 National Asian American Congressional Caucus. Ms. Aoki's plays have become part of the curriculum on several campuses. She is on the Theater Arts faculty at U.C. Santa Cruz and continues to lecture and teach at colleges across the nation.