Meet Mia Chung, PlayGround-NY’s 2025 Gala Guest of Honor

Posted by on August 22, 2025

We’re pleased to introduce this year’s One PlayGround Gala NY guest of honor: Mia Chung. Chung is an electrifying, defiant, award-winning playwright. Born in Tarrytown, New York, and raised by Korean parents in San Diego, Chung started as a sketch artist and screenwriter in LA and “sort of fell in love with theater” after moving to New York City. Her plays explore, through her inquiring subversiveness, the malleability of existing within the American cultural and familial structures. Helen Shaw, in her 2022 review of Chung’s Catch as Catch Can, writes, “I wish I could give a sense of how perfect [this play] is, how deft it is at capturing first our attention and then worming its way into senses deeper down […] I felt an electric sense in the audience, the certain knowledge I’m in the presence of a new classic, a play that will have a long, long life.” Catch as Catch Can will have a Chicago premiere in June 2026 as part of Steppenwolf’s 50th season, following acclaimed productions at Playwrights Horizons in 2022 and Page 73 in 2018.

Rob Yang and Cindy Cheung in “Catch as Catch Can” at Playwrights Horizons. Photograph by Joan Marcus, 2022.

With productions of her plays across the globe and more residencies and awards than one can count, Chung has cemented herself as one of the most dynamic new voices in the contemporary American theatre landscape. An alum of Huntington Playwriting Fellows, Ma-Yi Writers Lab, New Dramatists, and our very own PlayGround, her work includes Catch as Catch Can (Playwrights Horizons, 2022; Page 73, 2018); Ball in the Air (NAATCO/Public Theater, 2022); Double Take (Playwrights Horizons Almanac, 2021); This Exquisite Corpse (multiple awards); You for Me for You (Royal Court, National Theatre Company of Korea, Woolly Mammoth Theatre, multiple regionals; published by Bloomsbury Methuen). Since her start as a member of the PlayGround writing cohort, her work has been included in Fifty Playwrights on Their Craft (Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2018), The Kilroys List: 99 Monologues by Female & Trans* Playwrights, Vol 1 (Theatre Communications Group, 2016) and The Best Women’s Stage Monologues of 2013 (Smith & Kraus). She attended Yale (BA); the University of Dublin, Trinity College (M.Phil.); and Brown (MFA). She has recently become a 2024 MacDowell fellow and a 2023 Whiting Award recipient.

Chung now returns to PlayGround as our 2025 New York Gala Honoree. Right now, you can still get tickets to the event and have the opportunity to learn more about our honoree and be a part of an enriching exchange with the rest of our PlayGround community. Other featured honorees in their respective cities include: Lydia R. Diamond (Chicago), Philip Kan Gotanda (San Francisco), and Steve Yockey (Los Angeles). For tickets and more information, click here.