Jessica Tarahata Hagedorn | |
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 Hagedorn at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2008 | |
| Born | May 29, 1949 |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupations |
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Jessica Tarahata Hagedorn (born May 29, 1949) is an American playwright, writer, poet, and multimedia performance artist.
Jessica Tarahata Hagedorn | |
|---|---|
| Hagedorn at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2008 | |
| Born | May 29, 1949 |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupations |
|
Jessica Tarahata Hagedorn (born May 29, 1949) is an American playwright, writer, poet, and multimedia performance artist.
Hagedorn is an of mixed descent. She was born in Manila to a mother of Scots-Irish, French, and Filipino descent and a father of Filipino, Spanish, and Chinese heritage. [1] Moving to San Francisco in 1963, Hagedorn received her education at the American Conservatory Theater training program. To further pursue playwriting and music, she moved to New York City in 1978. [2]
In 1978, Joseph Papp produced Hagedorn's first play Mango Tango. [3] Hagedorn's other productions include Tenement Lover, Holy Food, and Teenytown. [4] Her mixed media style often incorporates song, poetry, images, and spoken dialogue. From 1975 until 1985, she was the leader of a poet's band—The West Coast Gangster Choir (in SF) and later The Gangster Choir (in New York). [5]
In 1985, 1986, 1989, and 1994 she received MacDowell Colony fellowships, which helped enable her to write the novel Dogeaters , which illuminates many different aspects of Filipino experience, focusing on the influence of America through radio, television, and movie theaters. [6] [7] She shows the complexities of the love-hate relationship many Filipinos in diaspora feel toward their past. After its publication in 1990, her novel earned a 1990 National Book Award nomination and an American Book Award. In 1998 La Jolla Playhouse produced a stage adaptation. [8] In 2001, the play adaptation premiered off-Broadway at The Public Theater.
Hagedorn worked with playwrights and artists Robbie McCauley and Laurie Carlos as the collective Thought Music, which later expanded to include visual artist John Woo as well. Together Thought Music created a number of works including Teenytown (presented at La Mama in 1987) [9] and class (presented at The Kitchen in 2000). [10] Thought Music together investigated race, class, sexism, and the role of immigrants in the United States. [11] Hagedorn, with Thought Music and on her own, has also collaborated with Urban Bush Women on works including Heat [12] and Lipstick. [13]
Hagedorn, alongside bell hooks, June Jordan, and seven others won the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund annual Writer's Awards in 1994 and received $105,000 each. [14]
In 2006, Hagedorn was one of the first eight playwrights to receive the Lucille Lortel Foundation fellowship. [15]
In 2021, Hagedorn was the recipient of the Bret Adams and Paul Reisch Foundation's 2021 Idea Awards for Theatre where she received The Tooth of Time Distinguished Career Award and $20,000. [16] [17] Hagedorn, in collaboration with Two River Theater, is also working on a musical detailing the rise of Jean and June Millington of Fanny. [5]
Hagedorn lives in New York City with her daughters.
David Henry Hwang is an American playwright, librettist, screenwriter, and theater professor at Columbia University in New York City. He has won three Obie Awards for his plays FOB, Golden Child, and Yellow Face. Three of his works have been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
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Esser Leopold "Lee" Breuer was an Obie Award-winning and Pulitzer-, Grammy-, Emmy- and Tony-nominated American playwright, theater director, academic, educator, filmmaker, poet, and lyricist. Breuer taught and directed on six continents.
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The Magic Theatre is a theatre company founded in 1967, presently based at the historic Fort Mason Center on San Francisco's northern waterfront. The Magic Theatre is well known and respected for its singular focus on the development and production of new plays. Sean San José is the Artistic Director.
Dogeaters is a novel written by Jessica Hagedorn and published in 1990. Hagedorn also adapted her novel into a play by the same name. Dogeaters, set in the late 1950s in Manila, addresses several social, political and cultural issues present in the Philippines during the 1950s.
The Gangster of Love is a novel written by Jessica Hagedorn and published by Houghton Mifflin in 1996.
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Filipino American theater ranges from topics such as Filipino/Filipino-American history to modern Filipino issues. The themes for these works were mostly influenced by the Spanish colonial rule as well as the American colonization.
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