Asian American Biographies

See Asia Society's online resources & upcoming programs celebrating Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. The following performers are participating in Asian American Tales of Being Urban: Living, Loving and Getting By (May 7-8).

(Also see bios of performers in Dancing Asia/New York and Tree Song )

Deborah S. Craig
Deborah S. Craig came to New York City with $500, a suitcase and no idea that she was Asian American. Since then, she has sung at Lincoln Center, been asked on a date by Jackie Mason and learned the art of surviving on spinach knishes. As an actress she has appeared off Broadway in the NY Times rave Wave by fave playwright Sung Rno. (Ma-Yi Theatre Co./dir. Will Pomerantz), Pericles (Red Bull/dir. Jesse Berger), The Karaoke Show (Project 400/Dir. Diane Paulus) and Fuenteovejuna (NAATCO/dir. David Herskovits) among some 30 productions!. Regionally Miss Craig has perfomed with American Stage in Love’s Labours Lost, in the rock musicals Dance With Me in Woodstock, NY and in Falco at the Ronacher Theatre in Vienna, Austria. As as recording artist, she has worked with Dreamfactory/Rick Wake Studios, Intonation Records and Next2Flex Entertainment. She has sung her original compositions for the Korean Centennial, the Red Room and all of her ex-boyfriends. This summer she will reprise her role as Gramercy Park in Tony Award winning composer William Finn’s newest musical The Twenty Fifth Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee at Barrington Stage Co. A die hard New York City lover, Miss Craig still only has about $500 and a suitcase but is now a proud Korean American and the founder of AA (Asians Anonymous). She has been Asian for 9 years now.

Ron Domingo
Ron Domingo is an OBIE Award winning actor and filmmaker. He is a New York based actor who has been acting in Theater, Film & Television for the last 13 years. Ron has also produced & directed films for Fish Out of Water, a film production company started with fellow actor, Ken Leung. His short film, "Chocolate," was a Golden Reel Award Nominee at the 2004 Visual Communications Film Festival in Los Angeles.

Luis H. Francia Poet, nonfiction writer, and critic, Luis H. Francia is the author of the semiautobiographical Eye of the Fish: A Personal Archipelago, honored with the 2002 PEN Center Open Book and the 2002 Asian American Writers literary awards. His latest collection of poems, Museum of Absences, will be released in late 2004. A Palanca Poetry Prize-winner, Francia has two earlier books of poems--Her Beauty Likes Me Well (with David Friedman) and The Arctic Archipelago and Other Poems, as well as a collection of reviews and essays, Memories of Overdevelopment. He edited Brown River, White Ocean: A Twentieth Century Anthology of Philippine Literature in English; Flippin’: Filipinos on America, with Eric Gamalinda as coeditor; and, along with Angel Velasco Shaw, Vestiges of War: The Philippine-American War and the Aftermath of an Imperial Dream, 1899-1999. He writes, in New York, for The Village Voice and The Nation, and, in Manila, for The Sunday Inquirer Magazine. A tale of two cities—Manila and New York--Francia teaches at New York University.

Jessica Hagedorn
Jessica Hagedorn was born and raised in the Philippines and came to the United States in her early teens. She attended the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, and moved to New York in 1978. Her work in theater as a performer and writer includes the acclaimed stage adaptation of Dogeaters, which was presented at La Jolla Playhouse and at the NYSF/Public Theater; Where The Mississippi Meets The Amazon, a collaboration with Thulani Davis and Ntozake Shange; TeenyTown, with Laurie Carlos and Robbie McCauley; and Airport Music with Han Ong.

Plays and monologues have been anthologized in Between Worlds (ed. by Misha Berson), Out From Under (ed. by Lenora Champagne), and Extreme Exposure (ed. by Jo Bonney) - all published by Theater Communications Group Press. The stage adaptation of Dogeaters was published by TCG Press in 2003. Her poetry and prose has also been anthologized widely.

Work in film includes scripts for Shu Lea Cheang's feature film, Fresh Kill, and four episodes of The Pink Palace, an animated series for the Oxygen Network.

Hagedorn's novels include Dream Jungle, The Gangster Of Love, which was nominated for the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and Dogeaters, which was nominated for a National Book Award. She is also the author of Danger And Beauty, a collection of poetry and prose, and the editor of Charlie Chan Is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction and Charlie Chan Is Dead 2: At Home In The World.

Essays and articles have been published in Time Asia, Harper's Bazaar, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, MS., BOMB, the Village Voice, The Nation, and USA Today.

Numerous grants and awards include a Guggenheim Fiction Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, as well as fellowships from the Sundance Theater Lab, the Sundance Playwrights' Lab, and the Sundance Screenwriters' Lab.

Ms. Hagedorn has taught in the MFA Creative Writing Program at Columbia University and at New York University. Currently, she is at work on a new novel and a musical play with composer Mark Bennett.

Kimiko Hahn
Poet Kimiko Hahn's most recent book of poems, The Artist's Daughter, was published by W.W. Norton in the fall of 2002. Mark Doty said of the collection, "Kimiko Hahn uses the extremes of human experience to examine the deep trouble and struggles of desire, the covert ties that bind together ordinary lovers, parents, and children. Rigorous intelligence, fierce anger, and finally a deep vulnerability inform these poems." Kimiko is the author of five other collections of poetry: Mosquito and Ant (W.W. Norton); Volatile (Hanging Loose); The Unbearable Heart (Kaya), which was awarded an American Book Award; Earshot (Hanging Loose), which received The Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize and an Association of Asian American Studies Literature Award; and Air Pocket (Hanging Loose). In 1995 she wrote ten portraits of women for the MTV special, "Ain't Nuthin' but a She-Thing," for which she also recorded the voice-overs. She has received fellowships from The National Endowment for Arts, The New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund. A professor in the English Department at Queens College/CUNY, Kimiko is currently working on two projects: a film script inspired by the photographs of Peter Lindbergh and a collection of poetry and prose, largely utilizing the classical Japanese forms, tanka and zuihitsu.

Andrew Hsiao
Andrew Hsiao is a writer, editor, and alternative media activist. As a senior editor for politics with the non-profit publishing house The New Press, he has worked with authors Peter Kwong, Vijay Prashad, Amitava Kumar, S. Shankar, Sonia Shah, Jesse Jackson, Ruben Martinez, Frances Fox Piven, and Bill Moyers, among others. He was a longtime editor and staff writer with The Village Voice, and has written about politics, immigration, race, labor, media, sports, books, theater, and film for The Voice, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Spin, A Magazine, scholarly journals, a prisoners’ publication, and other publications. He is the editor of the forthcoming Anti-Capitalism: A Field Guide to the Global Justice Movement (The New Press), and is a producer and host of Asia Pacific Forum, the weekly pan-Asian radio hour on WBAI 99.5 FM. He was a Revson Fellow at Columbia University and teaches at the Queens College Workers Extension Education Center.

David Henry Hwang
David Henry Hwang's plays include M. Butterfly (Tony Award), Golden Child (Tony nomination, OBIE Award), The Dance and the Railroad, and FOB (OBIE Award). His new book for Rodgers & Hammerstein's Flower Drum Song earned him his third Tony nomination in 2003, and he is currently represented on Broadway as co-author of Disney's Aida. Hwang also penned the feature films M. Butterfly, Golden Gate, and Possession (co-writer).

Jason Kao Hwang
Composer Jason Kao Hwang received a New Residencies grant from Meet the Composer in 1998. His residency partnership of Asia Society, Museum of Chinese in the Americas and Music From China commissioned him to compose an opera inspired by the oral histories of New York City's Chinatown.

During his Meet the Composer Residency Mr. Hwang has composed for Music From China including Bending Duration, Breathing Distance and Interior Migrations. His educational work with high school students at the Museum of Chinese in the Americas was documented by WNYC's Morning Edition.

Mr. Hwang's ensemble, The Far East Side Band, has released two CDs, Urban Archaeology (Victo Records) and Caverns (New World Records). They have performed at the Jazzgalerie Nickelsdorf Konfrontationen (Austria), the duMaurier Ltd. International Jazz Festival (Vancouver), International Festival Musique Actuelle (Victoriaville), Beijing International Jazz Festival, Chicago Asian American Jazz Festival, Freer Gallery (Washington, D.C.), Visions Festival (NYC) and many other stages.

His compositions for film include two feature documentaries for PBS, Sue Williams' China: Born Under the Red Flag and Judith Vecchione's Tug of War, The Story of Taiwan, and source music for Martin Scorcese's Kundun.

Recently, CRI released Mr. Hwang's composition Flight of Whispers on eXchange: China, a compilation CD of Chinese American composers. As violinist, he has performed on recordings including Anthony Braxton's 1996 Sextet (Istanbul) and 1995 Octet (NYC), Dominic Duval's The Navigator (Leo); Henry Threadgill's Come Save the Day (Columbia) and Butch Morris's Dust to Dust and Testament:, A Conduction Collection (New World). Over the years, he has performed with numerous artists including Vladamir Tarasov, Reggie Workman, Makanda Ken MacIntyre, Sirone and William Parker.

Shii Ann Huang
Shii Ann Huang was the first Asian American ever to appear on CBS's hit show, Survivor. In 2002, she starred in Survivor: Thailand (season 5) and currently co-stars on Survivor: All Stars (season 8) along with other all-time favorite cast members from the past.

Since appearing Survivor, Shii Ann has served as a guest lecturer and commentator. She has also traveled extensively abroad -- pursuing her love of different cultures, traditions and customs. Her curiosity has lead her to pursue diverse hobbies such as Afro-Cuban dance, Szechuanese cooking, travel photography and writing.

Shii Ann was born in Taipei, Taiwan, but grew up mainly in Arizona. After High school, she attended the University of California, Berkeley where she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature and New York University, where she received a master's degree at New York University/Tisch School of the Arts' Interactive Telecommunications Program.

She lives and works in New York City and enjoys her role as executive recruiter as well as a creative development partner for Max Curious Productions, a television/film production company. In her spare moments, she spends much of her time keeping up with New York City's diverse arts and cultural events.

Currently, Shii Ann is working on a book -- a lifestyle guide for young, career-oriented women based on her experiences surviving one of television's most challenging reality experiences and, more importantly, real life.

Vijay Iyer
Vijay Iyeris a self-taught composer, pianist, and improvisor. Recently he released his fifth and sixth albums: Blood Sutra (Artists House), featuring his quartet, and In What Language? (Pi Recordings) (see AsiaSource interview) in collaboration with poet/performer/producer Mike Ladd, commissioned by the Asia Society. Iyer has toured around the world with his ensembles and collaborations, and as a featured performer with Steve Coleman, Roscoe Mitchell, Amiri Baraka, and Burnt Sugar, among others. He has received grants from the New York State Council on the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, Arts International, Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, and Creative Capital. Last year he received the 2003 CalArts Alpert Award in the Arts. An occasional academic, he has lectured and published on improvisation, cognitive science, and performance studies.

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