Photo by Joseph O’Malley
playwright | actor | poeT | Translator
Stefani Kuo (郭佳怡) is a playwright/performer and native of Hong Kong and Taiwan. She received her M.F.A. from the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale and her B.A. in Theater Studies from Yale University.
Fluent in Cantonese, Mandarin, French, and English, she crafts multicultural, multilingual narratives for an international audience. A member of SPACE on Ryder Farm’s 2024 Working Farm as well as a recipient of a 2024 MacDowell Residency, she has been an awardee of the Jerome Fellowship at PWC, Dramatist Guild Fellowship.
She has received commissions from the Atlantic Theater Company, Ensemble Studio Theatre/Sloan, the Rubin Museum, Roundhouse Theater, and Yangtze Repertory. Her play on the Hong Kong protests, Final Boarding Call was the winner of the 2021 Lead Ryan Fund for Emerging Women Writers’ Prize.
Her play Wake was presented in the Yale Langston Hughes Festival 2022.
Her play Pearl’s Beauty Salon was produced in May 2024 as part of the Yale Carlotta Festival, directed by Mina Morita. She is currently a member of Young Blood, Ensemble Studio Theater’s Writers' Group, and was a 2019 member of I-73, Page 73’s Writers Group.
Her work in non-fiction has appeared in The New York Times.
As a performer, she most recently worked on two short films, Preludes by April Wen, and Someday by Justin Cheung. She was most recently seen in Arlington by Enda Walsh at the Yale Cabaret, directed by Bobbin Ramsey. She also performed her one-woman show Moonie this past October at the Yale Cabaret. She was also seen in The Merry Wives of Windsor with Elm Shakespeare and The Betrayal Project at the Yale Summer Cabaret, which she co-created.
Her play Final Boarding Call will be presented as part of the Kendeda Festival at the Alliance Theater Company in Atlanta, GA, in February 2025.