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
"Tea is not quiet, but turbulent. We
Japanese women drink a lot of it. Become it. Swallow the tempest.
And nobody knows the storm inside. We remain... peaceful,
contained, the eye of the hurricane. But if you can taste the tea, if it
can roll over your tongue in one swallow, then the rest will come to you.
When the tea leaves are left behind in the bottom of a cup. When we
are long gone and forgotten."From Velina
Hasu Houston's Tea
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.