Story Medicine: The Transformative Power of Theatre

Velina Hasu Houston
Professor, Playwright, Poet and Essayist

Saturday , March 13, 2010. 4 pm, PST

Velina Hasu Houston’s most popular work is her critically acclaimed play Tea. It and many of her other works have been presented internationally, garnering more than three dozen writing awards. Her other critically acclaimed plays include Asa Ga Kimashita, Kokoro, The Matsuyama Mirror, Calling Aphrodite, Calligraphy. She has been recognized three times by The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, twice been selected as a Rockefeller Foundation playwriting fellow, and was a recipient of a Japan Foundation fellowship and a Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Foundation grant. She was chosen as the inaugural recipient of the Remy Martin New Vision Award from Sidney Poitier and the American Film Institute.

Velina Hasu Houston is also a published poet and essayist; and writes for film, radio and television as well. A specialist in Pan-Asian American feminist dramatic literature, she edited the anthologies The Politics of Life: Four Plays by Asian American Women and But Still, Like Air, I’ll Rise: New Asian American Plays . She has lectured at institutions nationwide and taught screenwriting at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Theater, Film and Television. Velina Hasu Houston teaches courses in Playwriting and Adaptation and serves as Resident Playwright, Professor, Associate Dean of Faculty, and founder/Director of the MFA in Dramatic Writing at the University of Southern California.