NEW YORK CITY: Ma-Yi Theater Company has announced the newest members of the Ma-Yi Writers Lab, the largest collective of Asian American and Pacific Islander playwrights in the country. The new members include Nina Ki, Roger Q. Mason, Claro de los Reyes, ayla xuân chi sullivan, Gaven D. Trinidad, Seayoung Yim, and Max Yu.
The Ma-Yi Writers Lab, unique for its peer-to-peer format, is based in permanent residence at Ma-Yi. Ma-Yi is committed to providing the Writers Lab with rehearsal facilities and developmental support for workshops and readings, with the playwright at the center of the process. Trinidad, along with Kalino Ko and current Ma-Yi Writers Lab member Kimber Lee, will serve as co-coordinators of this cohort.
Ki is a Queer and Korean (or Queerean) American playwright based in Brooklyn. Their plays have been presented with MCC Theater, Queens Theatre, Yale Summer Cabaret, and the Parsnip Ship. Their play Moon Bear was given special consideration for the Relentless Award, and their play Taemong (Birth Dream) was a finalist for the Van Lier Fellowship. Ki was an inaugural member of the Parsnip Ship’s Radio Roots Writer’s Group and is currently a member of Clubbed Thumb’s Early Career Writer’s Group. They hold an BFA from New York University Tisch School of the Arts.
Roger Q. Mason is a writer and performer who work has been seen on Broadway (Circle in the Square Reading Series), Off and Off-Off-Broadway, and regionally. Mason’s world premiere of Lavender Men was lauded by the Los Angeles Times as “evoking the mingled visions of Suzan-Lori Parks, Jeremy O. Harris and Michael R. Jackson.” They are a member of the Dramatists Guild of America, Page 73’s Interstate 73 Writers Group, and Primary Stages Writing Cohort; the co-host of Sister Roger’s Gayborhood podcast; and lead mentor of the Shay Foundation Fellowship and the New Visions Fellowship.
De los Reyes is an actor and theatre and film storyteller of the Filipino diaspora. As a playwright, his recent works have been featured in the Cultural Center of the Philippines’s Virgin Labfest and in the Leviathan Lab’s Filipino American History Month Reading Series. His acting credits include Pan Asian Repertory Theatre, the National Asian American Theatre Company, International WOW, and the Ice Factory Festival at New Ohio Theatre, among others. de los Reyes is a graduate of the Fordham College at Lincoln Center program.
Sullivan is a Black and Vietnamese nonbinary performance artist from Colorado. They are an actor, playwright, director, poet, and educator, and co-founded Shift 23 Media. Their work has been seen at MCC, TOSOS, the LGBT Center, and in Dakar, Senegal. The inaugural New Visions Fellow of the National Queer Theater and the Dramatists Guild, sullivan has been published in Playbill, the Dramatist, and 303 Magazine, as well as in this magazine.
Trinidad is a first generation Filipinx American theatremaker and educator from New York who is currently the community engagement associate at New York Theatre Workshop. They have worked in artistic and administrative roles at the Julliard School, Musical Theatre Factory, Jacob’s Pillow, Roundabout, Second Stage Theater, and the National Queer Theater. Trinidad’s dramaturgy credits include the Yangtze Repertory Theatre of America and Ping Chong and Company, among others, and their directing credits include Rattlestick Theater and the Global Forms Theater Festival. In 2021, Theatre Communications Group named Trinidad a Rising Leader of Color. Trinidad holds a BA from Dickinson College and an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where they have also taught.
Yim is a playwright from Seattle whose play Jar of Fat won the 2022 Yale Drama Series Prize and won second place for the Paul Stephen Lim Playwriting Award. She has been a finalist for the Playwrights Realm’s Scratchpad Series and is the recipient of the playwriting fellowship at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Theatre Puget Sound’s Gregory Award, and Seattle’s Gypsy Rose Lee Award for Excellence in Local Playwriting. Yim recently completed her MFA at Brown University, where she was the recipient of the Stephen Sondheim Graduate Fellowship.
Yu is a first generation Chinese American playwright from the San Francisco Bay Area. His play Nightwatch received the 2019 Relentless Award, was a finalist for the Princess Grace Playwriting Fellowship, and was selected for the 2022 National Playwrights Conference. Yu is currently under commission from the Atlantic Theater Company and Shaking the Tree Theatre and was a member of Page 73’s 2021-22 Interstate 73 Writers Group. His plays have been workshopped and developed with the Goodman Theatre, Second Generation Productions, the American Playwriting Foundation, and Horizon Theatre Company, among others. Yu has taught playwriting at the National Theater Institute and his poetry and prose has been published in China. He is a graduate of UCLA.
Ma-Yi Theater Company is an award-winning professional organization whose primary mission is to develop and produce new and innovative plays by Asian American writers. As of 2021, the theatre had a budget of approximately $698,000.
