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 Hawai’i 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, Chicago.
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 theater 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 around the globe including U.S. nationwide, Osaka, Tokyo, Hiroshima, nationwide radio in Japan, People’s Republic of China, Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia.
Since 2000, Houston has had ten world premieres in regional theatres (The Pasadena Playhouse, George Street Playhouse, Sacramento Theatre Company, International City Theatre) and other venues across the country. Currently, Houston is involved in 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. She also is writing a libretto with Los Angeles Opera on One-Ten in collaboration with Shishir Kurup (Laura Cartman, Composer). Tea as well as other plays of Houston’s continue to be produced internationally to popular and critical acclaim. Houston’s newest works-in-progress include Calligraphy, A Spot of Bother, For Now In A Mirror Dimly, Cinnamon Girl, and The Last Resort (2007 semi-finalist, New Harmony Project and PlayLabs.)
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, and a James Zumberge Fellow (thrice). 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, Tokyo. 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 poet Carol Muske Dukes, Houston was a part of Visions and Voices: The USC Arts & Humanities Initiative, receiving a $50,000 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 Players. Currently, she is a New Directions Fellow for the Center for Feminist Research under the auspices of which she is developing her play Calligraphy.
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 latest book is from Smith and Kraus Publishers, “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, 2008. 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, Smith and Kraus, 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.
Houston’s awards and honors include the Made in America Visionary Award, Pinter Review Prize for Drama Silver Medal, 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, 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; 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), and a member of the Japan-US Bridging Foundation.
Along with Paula Cizmar, Marianne McDonald, and Laura Shamas, Houston is a Founding Partner of Left Coast Women, an organization dedicated to upholding and preserving the voices of women playwrights living on the U.S. West Coast.
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. Her multicultural family includes these ethnicities as well as Chinese, 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 Hawai'i and Kyoto. Raised in the Shinto faith, 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.
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