Kristina Wong

Kristina Wong

Kristina Wong, a Doris Duke Artist in the theater category, is a profound and hilarious performance artist, comedian and writer who employs humor to explore difficult subjects and amplify marginalized experiences. She has been presented across North America, Africa, the United Kingdom and Hong Kong.

She has been a guest on late night shows on NBC, Comedy Central and FX, and has starred in her own pilot presentation with Lionsgate for truTV. Her commentaries have appeared on American Public Media’s Marketplace, PBS, VICE, CNN, as well as in Jezebel, Playgirl Magazine and HuffPost. She’s been awarded artist residencies from MacDowell, San Diego Airport and Ojai Playwrights Festival. She is a Pulitzer Prize finalist in Drama, and her work has received support from Creative Capital, The MAP Fund, Center for Cultural Innovation, National Performance Network, a COLA Master Artist Fellowship from the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, nine Los Angeles Artist-in-Residence awards, Center Theatre Group’s Sherwood Award and the Art Matters Foundation.

Her recent work “Kristina Wong for Public Office” is a real-life stint—she serves on the Wilshire Center Koreatown Neighborhood Council—as well as a comedic performance filmed for Center Theater Group’s Digital Stage.

She created and directed original theater works in partnership with the Bus Riders Union and API Rise, and is a founder of the Auntie Sewing Squad, a national mutual aid network that organized volunteers to sew cloth masks and subsequently distributed them to vulnerable communities during the COVID-19 pandemic. She contributed to “The Auntie Sewing Squad Guide to Mask Making, Radical Care and Racial Justice,” a book from the University of California Press. Her role in the Auntie Sewing Squad is also the subject of her currently touring Off-Broadway show “Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord,” which has won a Drama Desk Award, Outer Critics Circle Award and a Lucille Lortel Award for “Outstanding Solo Performance,” and was deemed a New York Times “Critics Pick.”

Her previous solo shows also include “Discharges from American History,” “Free?,” “Going Green the Wong Way,” “Wong Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “The Wong Street Journal.”

She is concurrently the Artist-in-Residence at ASU Gammage and a Social Practice Resident at the Kennedy Center until 2026. Her forthcoming project “#FoodBankInfluencer,” for which the artist will collaborate with Indigenous communities to address food insecurity, recently received the inaugural Joan D. Firestone Commissioning Award from En Garde Arts.