Playwright Naomi Iizuka is a two-time Joyce Award recipient. In 2004, she received a Joyce Awards to create a new play in collaboration with Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, and in 2011 she received a Joyce Award to develop a children’s play with The Children’s Theatre Company in Minneapolis.
Iizuka was born in Tokyo and raised in Japan, Indonesia, Holland, and Washington, D.C. She is the author of 36 Views, Language of Angels, War of the Worlds (written in collaboration with Anne Bogart and SITI Company), Polaroid Stories, Aloha, Say the Pretty Girls, Tattoo Girl, Scheherazade, and Skin. A member of
The 2004 Joyce Award will supported the Goodman Theatre’s commissioning and performance of Ghostwritten by Iizuka, exploring the legacy of U.S. foreign policy in South East Asia and its repercussions within the United States in the decades following the war. The production will drew on the experiences of South East Asian refugees now living in the American Midwest.
The 2011 Joyce Award supported the development of an original work based on Japanese folktales that will introduce young audiences to the cosmic dilemmas and archetypal situations in traditional Japanese literature and fairytales. Staging will utilize theatrical elements of Kabuki theater. Designed for audiences of five to eight year-old children, the work is being developed in partnership with Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, and is anticipated to premiere during CTC’s 2013 season.