Velina Hasu Houston

The official website of Velina Hasu Houston
with information regarding her
literary career and upcoming events.

B I O G R A P H Y 

Velina Hasu Houston is an internationally acclaimed playwright of over twenty plays as well as a published poet and essayist, and screenwriter.  She has published two anthologies of Asian American drama, one of them being the first anthology of plays by Asian American women.

Houston is the recipient of fifteen playwriting commissions from distinguished institutions such as Manhattan Theatre Club, Los Angeles Opera, Asia Society, Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Foundation, Mark Taper Forum (two), State of Hawaii Foundation on Culture and the Arts, Jewish Women's Theatre Project, Sacramento Theatre Company (three), Cornerstone Theatre Company, Mixed Blood Theatre Company, Honolulu Theatre for Youth, and Silk Road Theatre Project in association with the Goodman Theatre.

Houston began her writing career as a teenager receiving Young Kansas Writer awards for her poetry and recognition from the Kennedy Center/American College Theatre Festival for her one-act play, Switchboard.  By twenty-two, her play, Asa Ga Kimashita (Morning Has Broken) garnered two national first prize awards, The Lorraine Hansberry Award for the best new play about the African American experience and The David Library Award for the best new play about American freedom (Kennedy Center/ACTF).  By twenty-four, she was produced Off-Broadway with American Dreams at the Negro Ensemble Company and regionally in Los Angeles at the nation's oldest Asian American theatre company, East West Players, with Asa Ga Kimashita.  Within six years, she was Off-Broadway again at Manhattan Theatre Club with the world premiere of her play, Tea, which has become a hallmark of her work with numerous productions and presentations around the globe including U.S. nationwide, Osaka, Tokyo, Hiroshima, nationwide radio in Japan, People's Republic of China, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, and Indonesia. 

In 2010, Houston completed a multi-playwright commission, The DNA Trail, along with David Henry Hwang, Elizabeth Wong, Philip Kan Gotanda, Shishir Kurup, Lina Patel, and Jamil Khoury at Silk Road Theatre Project, Chicago, produced in association with the Goodman Theatre.  Relatedly, she penned an article about the process of The DNA Trail that was published in American Theatre magazine (March 2010).  She is working on a commission with LA Opera in collaboration with Shishir Kurup to create a contemporary opera about Los Angeles.  Tea as well as other plays of Houston's continue to be produced internationally to popular and critical acclaim.  Tea had two productions in Japan in 2009 and a 2010 concert reading in Bonnie Franklin's Classic & Contemporary Play Series that conducts outreach to disenfranchised high schools to expose them to U.S. classic plays.

Her plays have been produced and presented at such venues as Manhattan Theatre Club, The Pasadena Playhouse, Old Globe Theatre, Sacramento Theatre Company, Syracuse Stage, Barrington Stage Company, TheatreWorks, George Street Playhouse, Pittsburgh Public Theatre, Smithsonian Institution, Whole Theatre (Olympia Dukakis, producer), Silk Road Theatre Project, Japan Society (New York), L.A. Theatre Works, National Public Radio, Tokyo Engeki Ensemble, NHK Nippon Hoso Kai (Japan, nationwide), Amagasaki Piccolo Theatre (Osaka, Japan), Negro Ensemble Company, Theatre X (Tokyo), Odyssey Theatre Ensemble, Lincoln Center Institute, Honolulu Theatre for Youth, Kumu Kahua, Purple Rose Theatre (Jeff Daniels, producer), Theatre of Yugen, East West Players, Asian American Repertory Theatre, and others.  She is an artistic associate of the Sacramento Theatre Company and on the Board of Advisors of Asian American Repertory Theatre, San Diego.  Regarding musical theatre, she penned a libretto treatment for Marstar Productions (Sophie's Choice, A Few Good Men) for a Broadway musical play about the life of Bert Williams. 

Across the span of her career, Houston has been recognized as a Japan Foundation Fellow, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow (twice), a Sidney F. Brody Fellow, a James Zumberge Fellow (thrice), a California Arts Council fellow, and a Los Angeles Endowment for the Arts Fellow.  She is a Pinter Review Prize for Drama Silver Medalist for Calling Aphrodite, which also was a finalist for the American Theatre Critics Association Steinberg New Play Award for its 2007 world premiere.  Calling Aphrodite has been embraced by The former Honorable Consul General of Japan of Los Angeles Kazuo Kodama as a "remarkable and appropriate exploration" of the Hiroshima experience; he paralleled Houston's work in drama to the work of Isamu Noguchi in fine art, both being offspring of one Japanese parent and one American parent.  In 2008, Calling Aphrodite was presented at Tokyo Engeki Ensemble (TEE), Tokyo.  TEE and Houston continue to collaborate toward an international presentation of the play in 2011.  Houston's work in Messy Utopia, a commissioned project at Mixed Blood Theatre, was the recipient of the Twin Cities 2007 Ivey Award.  Along with California Poet Laureate Carol Muske Dukes, Houston was a part of Visions and Voices:  The USC Arts & Humanities Initiative, receiving a 2008 grant to explore the power of language in theatre and poetry.  Her play, Ikebana, was honored by PEN Center USA West.  She is the 2008 recipient of the Made in America Visionary Award from East West and a 2009 Red Carpet Award from Women in Theatre. She also received a second USC Visions and Voices grant to support a special performance event of Calligraphy directed by Jon Lawrence Rivera; Dramaturg, Luis Alfaro, in September 2009.  Calligraphy will have its world premiere at Los Angeles Theatre Center in fall 2010 with the same director and dramaturge; Artistic Director, Jose Luis Valenzuela.

For film, Houston has written for Columbia Pictures, Sidney Poitier, PBS (adapted Yoshiko Uchida's Journey Home for WonderWorks, staff writer for Puzzle Place), Lancit Media and several independent producers. A documentary film that Houston co-produced [Frank Suffert and Lillemor Mallau's Desert Dreamers] premiered on PBS-KQED's "Truly California" series in September 2006 with Peter Fonda as Narrator.

Her critical essays and poetry are published in journals and anthologies. Her book "Writer’s Block" Busters:  101 Exercises to Clear the Dead Wood and Make Room for Flights of Fancy, a cornucopia of writing exercises to jump-start the imagination, is published by Smith and Kraus, which also has published her work in The Best Women's Stage Monologues of 2008  and Short Plays for Young Actors (1996).  Her essay, Matters of the Heart:  To Be A Dragonslayer, was published in Choice: True Stories of Birth, Contraception, Infertility, Adoption, Single Parenthood, and Abortion, Edited by Karen Bender and Nina de Gramont, MacAdam/Cage Publishing Inc., 2007.  She has edited two Asian American drama anthologies: The Politics of Life (Temple University Press, 1993) and But Still, Like Air, I'll Rise (Temple, 1997).  Besides these volumes, her plays appear in anthologies published by Vintage Books-Random House, Applause Books, University of Massachusetts Press, University of Illinois Press, Rowman & Littlefield, Heinemann, and University of Texas Press.  An acting edition of Tea is published by Dramatists Play Service.  A majority of her works is available from Alexander Street Press.  She penned the foreword to Yuko Kurahashi's book, Asian American Culture on Stage: The History of the East West Players; and is included in the books Encounters:  People of Asian Descent in the Americas (Editors Roshni Rustomji-Kerns, Rajini Srikanth, and Leny Mendoza Strobel), Amy Ling's Yellow Light:  The Flowering of Asian American Arts, as well as other books of cultural criticism.  She has written for American Theatre magazine and the Los Angeles Times.  Currently in development is The Myth Strikes Back:  Medea Plays by Women, co-edited with Dr. Marianne McDonald.  She has been published in Japan by Akashi Shoten (Contributor, Crossing the Ocean:  A New Look at the History of Japanese Picture Brides and Japanese War Brides, Editor:  Noriko Shimada, Tokyo 2009).  Forthcoming publications include:  Japanese War Brides' Experiences:  Immigration, Gender, and Ethnicity, Editor:  Fumiteru Nitta, University of Hawaii Press, 2010, Chapter:  "Matsuyama Daughter:  Japanese War Brides in Kansas"; The Eyes of Bones in Living and Writing on America's Left Coast:  Contemporary Women's Plays, 2010; and Outstanding Women's Monologues, Dramatists Play Service 2010.  She is working on a novel version of her play Tea and a collection of her plays, Green Tea Girl in Orange Pekoe Country.

Houston's awards and honors include the Made in America Visionary Award, Pinter Review Prize for Drama Silver Medal, Women in Theatre Red Carpet Award, Inaugural Recipient of the USC Provost's Mentoring Award, Twin Cities Ivey Award, Remy Martin New Vision Screenwriting Award from Sidney Poitier and the American Film Institute, Japan Foundation fellowship, James Zumberge Innovation Fund individual fellowship (twice), James Zumberge Innovation Fund interdisciplinary collaborative fellowship for 2002-2003 (with Dr. Dorinne Kondo for her play Seamless and for Houston's play Calling Aphrodite), Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award, David Library of American Freedom Playwriting Award, California Arts Council fellow, Japanese American Woman of Merit 1890-1990 by the National Japanese American Historical Society, East West Players Made in America Award, Women in Theatre Red Carpet Award, Susan Smith Blackburn Prize finalist, twice-named Rockefeller Foundation fellow, and others.  In Japan, several documentary films about her work and family have been produced by Japan's key broadcasting concerns:  Nippon Hoso Kai, Mainichi Hoso, and Television Tokyo Channel 12. 

A Phi Beta Kappa, Houston is Professor of Theatre, Director of Dramatic Writing, Associate Dean of Faculty, and Resident Playwright at the School of Theatre, University of Southern California, where she founded the graduate playwriting program in 1990.  She also guest-taught the 434 Advanced Screenwriting Workshop in the School of Theater, Film, and Television at her alma mater, the University of California at Los Angeles, for a decade.  In 1999-2000, she was a Visiting Professor at Doshisha University, Kyoto.  Houston has a Ph.D. from the School of Cinema Arts, USC; (minor in English) a Master of Fine Arts from UCLA's School of Theater, Film, and Television; and a Bachelor of Arts in journalism, mass communications, and theater (minor in philosophy) from the A.Q. Miller School of Journalism and Mass Communications, Kansas State University.

Currently, Houston is a Commissioner for the U.S. Department of State's Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission, a member of the U.S.-Japan Conference on Cultural and Educational Interchange (a binational cultural advisory panel initiated by President John F. Kennedy), and a member of the Japan-US Bridging Foundation.  In Japan, she also has served as a Research Advisor for "Studies on Modernization of Classic Greek Theatre and Myth in Contemporary British, Irish, and American Poetic Drama and Theatre," Curator:  Professor Mariko Hori Tanaka, Aoyama Gakuin Daigaku, Tokyo.

Professional memberships include The Writers Guild of America, west; The Dramatists Guild, and the Alliance of Los Angeles Playwrights. 

Her works and papers are archived in The Velina Hasu Houston Collection; Huntington Library, Art Collections, & Botanical Gardens; San Marino, California; Curator:  Ms. Sara Sue Hodson.  To access partial archives on-line at the Huntington, go to: http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf2m3n98qm. 

A smaller collection of her work exists at the University of California, Santa Barbara; and in New World Theatre's Asian American Theater Collection at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.  

On the personal front, Velina Hasu Houston is of Japanese, Blackfoot Pikuni Native American Indian, and African American heritage with historical ties to India, Cuba, and China. Her multicultural family includes these ethnicities as well as Hawaiian, English, German, and Scottish ethnicities. She was born on a military ship on international waters enroute from Japan to the United States; her birth is registered at the first post-occupation U.S. base at which her father was assigned. She is the second daughter of Setsuko Takechi, a native of Matsuyama (Japan) and Lemo Houston, a native of Alabama. She has one sister, Dr. H. Rika Houston, and one brother, George Adam Houston, an Amerasian war orphan who was adopted in Tokyo during the U.S. occupation at the age of eight. Houston was reared in Junction City, Kansas, a small town adjacent to Fort Riley, a once-thriving Army installation. The community in which she was reared consisted of approximately 700 immigrant Japanese women, their American husbands of various ethnicities, and their multicultural Hapa children. The community also included immigrant European women who had married Americans after World War II [Germans, Austrians, British, French, and Italians; hence Houston's global education in the kitchens and hearts of immigrant women from around the world]. Houston remained in Kansas for her undergraduate studies to aid her widowed mother. When her mother remarried, Houston moved to California to attend graduate school at UCLA and then at USC. She is married to Peter H. Jones of Manchester, England. She has two biological children and two stepsons. She resides in Los Angeles. Her cultural homes are Hawaii and Kyoto. Raised with Shintoism and Buddhism, she attends an Episcopal parish, but practices a a polytheistic faith.

Inquiries should be addressed to Ms. Mary Harden, Harden-Curtis Associates, 850 Seventh Avenue, Suite 903, New York, New York 10019, Telephone (212) 977-8502, Facsimile (212) 977-8420, maryharden@hardencurtis.com.

Ichigo ichie...

...each encounter in life happens only once.