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Kristina Wong is a nationally presented solo performer, writer, actor, educator, culture jammer, and filmmaker. The East Bay Express describes her as “Brutal but hilarious… a woman who takes life’s absurdities very seriously.” Noted for her quirky, culture-jamming, and subversive tactics, Kristina takes an offbeat artistic approach to activism that upstages the strangeness of our times. Kristina recently received the Creative Capital Grant in Theater and a Creation Fund from the National Performance Network to develop her third full-length solo show “Wong Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”— exploring the remarkably high incidence of mental illness among Asian American women in a world more nuts than we are. The show was co-commissioned with a National Performance Network Creation Fund with La Pena Cultural Center (Berkeley) and the Asian Arts Initiative (Philadelphia). Her first solo show, "Miss Chinatown 2nd Runner Up" was commissioned by the TeAda New Works Festival and was an LA Times "Best Bet". Her second full length show, “Free?” has toured across the country. Most recently "Free?" was the only "performance art meets stand-up comedy" offering of Miami's South Beach Comedy Festival in association with Comedy Central.
Her work has shown nationally in spaces that include the REDCAT (Los Angeles), Mark Taper Forum (Los Angeles), South Beach Comedy Festival (Miami, Fl), Bay Area Hip Hop Theater Festival, the NYC Hip Hop Theater Festival(at the Public Theater), Kirk Theater in New York (National Asian American Theater Festival), the Painted Bride (Philadelphia, PA), Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, The Off-Centre (Austin, TX), Jumpstart Theater Company (San Antonio, TX) and dozens of universities around the country.
In addition to stage performance, Kristina has created a series of site-specific performance pranks and installations that reinterpret everything from Homeland Security, Asian Sororities to the Miss Chinatown Pageant. One of her first projects was Bigbadchinesemama.com, a mock mail order bride site launched in 2000 that continues to provoke Asian fetishists, porn directors, activists and klansmen today.
As a writer, she has been a guest contributor to Playgirl Magazine and written for anthologies like the Yell-oh! Girls Anthology (Harper Collins), the Catching a Wave Anthology (Northeastern University Press), and Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul IV. She is currently at work on a novel that she started with the Rosenthal PEN USA Emerging Voices Fellowship. She also has contributed writing to various online publications.
As an actor, she has trained at the Stephen Book Acting Studios and the Groundlings. Kristina was selected from thousands of actors to write and perform in the 2008 CBS Network Multicultural Comedy Showcase. Kristina has toured in Will and Company’s “American Voices,” an eight character one-person show that tours to schools nationally. She was part of the San Francisco Fringe Festival OPM (an LA based sketch comedy troupe) cast crowned "Best of the Fringe."
As a community activist and educator, Kristina teaches performance and writing workshops primarily for youth and people of color. She has been awarded for three years with an Artist-in-Residence award from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs to lead “BECAUSE,” a multi-generational performance and writing workshop for women of color. Kristina was also selected as an American delegate by the Korea Multi-Cultural Leadership program in 2005 to dialogue with Korea's community, educational, and governmental leaders. She is the former artistic director of the Asian American Teen Theater Company, creating educational theater on teen issues like HIV/AIDS with youth. She also worked as a news reporter for KPFK public radio and also parades occasionally with the Billionaires for Bush, a satirical street theater campaign that exposes politicians support corporate interests at the expense of everyday Americans. She even"billionaired" in Washington DC during Bush's inaugruation and crashed a black tie Republican gala event.
As a filmmaker, Kristina produced and directed "Beat the Bus." A documentary/ reality performance where Larry, a recent college grad with a sizeable educational debt, ran a real life foot race against a Santa Monica Blue Bus. The documentary recieved support from Visual Communications’ “Armed with a Camera” Fellowship and has screened nationally. Kristina has created shorter experimental video works that have screened locally in Los Angeles. She also has short videos that she makes as video diaries, commentary, and kicks out some video experiments on her YouTube Channel.
Her work has garnered press from outlets that include Vogue Knitting, The Village Voice, East Bay Express, LA Weekly, SF Examiner, PBS Bookshow, CHUM TV on Canadian Network Television, BUST, Ms. Magazine, Bitch Magazine, the International Channel, Current TV, and the upcoming documentary "Yours Truly, Miss Chinatown" by Daisy Lin Shapiro.
Other grants and awards include an award from the Center for Cultural Innovation, Durfee ARC grant, a mini-commission from the Mark Taper Forum’s Asian Theater Workshop, an O’Connor Scholar Award from the Davis Putter Foundation, a DBD scholarship from the Rachel Rosenthal Company, a residency from the Hermitage Retreat and a Hothouse Residency from UCLA.
Born and raised in San Francisco, Kristina splits her time between San Francisco and Los Angeles when not on tour. She drives Harold, a 1981 pink Mercedez Benz that runs on vegetable oil. The car's popularity has managed to eclipsed her art career when it received front page press in the LA Times Calendar Section and is the subject on a story currently running on Current TV.
Kristina is ever so slowly working on a new show, "The Cat Lady" where she will converge elements of dry humping, pick-up artists, unwed cat ladies, reality tv show auditions and a set of paper cat sculptures to explode the surreal moments of human loneliness.
(Kristina also jogs a modest Hollywood acting career along the side. She's been in numerous independent films and even starred on an internet sitcom whose dotcom went miserably under without notification to be bought by a mature porn site. On commercials, she's been an Eskimo, a Japanese milkmaid with huge hands, and other other human oddities that sell everything from hot dogs to car insurance.)
Latest
artistic statement on her work (at least as of 2/23/06)...
I am drawn to creating non-traditional, multi-disciplinary performance because of my influence by innumerous cultures, religions, political thinking, technology and post-modern performance art. Multi-disciplinary work logically mirrors my own multi-layered identity and the communities I live and have lived in. I experiment with interactive, improvisational performance that blurs “artist” and “audience”—allowing both to be active in creating the message. I am drawn to “culture jammers” like Michael Moore and the Yes Men. I also appreciate the simplicy and elegance of interactive work like Yoko Ono's. Their performances are disguised within daily life to subvert, manipulate, and explode the status quo. Much of my work similarly offers social commentary and bypasses theaters and galleries—staged on the internet or alternative spaces. In my theater work, I strive to challenge traditional performance with humor and satire and a multi-genre approach.
Past
Performance Highlights-- Partial list
South Beach Comedy Festival, Miami, FL
NYC Hip Hop Theater Festival at the Public Theater
Bay Area Hip Hop Theater Festival
Painted Bride, Philadelphia, PA
National Asian American Theater Festival, New York City
TeAda New Works Festival, Los Angeles, CA
Off-Centre, Austin, TX
Jumpstart Performance Company, San Antonio, TX
Highways Performance Space, Santa Monica, CA
Mark Taper Forum at the Ivy Substation, Los Angeles
University of Illinois, Chicago
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Asian Arts Initiative, Philadelphia, PA
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Michigan State University, East Lansing
University of Southern California, Los Angeles
The Egyptian Theater, Hollywood, CA
University of Virginia at Charlottesville (ECAASU)
La Pena Cultural Center, Berkeley, CA
Asia Society, San Francisco
REDCAT, Los Angeles
Single File Festival, Chicago, IL
DeAnza College Cupertino, CA
University of Florida, Gainesille
National Asian American Students Conference at USC, Los Angeles
The Fake Gallery, Hollywood
Wet Daddy Literary Festival, Altadena, CA
Split ID Space, Hollywood, CA
David Henry Hwang Theater, Los Angeles
University of Texas, Austin
University of North Carolina, Asheville
Wellesley College, MA
University of IL, Urbana-Champaign
DePaul University, Chicago
New Chinatown Barber Shop Gallery, Los Angeles
SOMARTS, San Francisco
UC San Diego
Guest Lectures/ Demonstrations/ Keynotes/ Panels
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Michigan State University, East Lansing
University of Illinois, Chicago
DePaul University, Chicago, IL
University of North Carolina, Asheville
Mercy High School, San Francisco
St. John Fisher College, Rochester, NY
Nazareth College, Rochester, NY
University of Southern California
California Polytechnic University, Pomona
San Francisco State University
Los Angeles City College; University of California, Irvine
University of IL, Urbana-Champaign
Wellesley College, MA
University of California, Davis
University of California, Los Angeles
California State University, Northridge
University of California, Santa Barbara
Asia Society, San Francisco
SOMARTS, San Francisco
California State University, Fullerton
University of Southern California, Los Angeles
Awards
and Recognitions
Creative Capital Award in Theater
Creation Fund from the National Performance Network
NEA Grant- Artist in “Community Action Series” La Pena Cultural Center
DBD Scholarship, Rachel Rosenthal Company
American Delegate, Korea Multi-Cultural Leadership Program
Davis-Putter O'Connor Scholar Award
Durfee
Artist Resource for Completion Grant
City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department, Artist in Residence Grant
Rosenthal
PEN USA Emerging Voices Fellowship
TeAda New Works Development Lab, Selected Core Artist
15 Minutes of Fem, Winner "Best of-- Night"
Poets
and Writers' Grant
Visual Communications' "Armed with A Camera" Fellowship
Mark Taper
Forum's Asian Theater Workshop Performance Commission
Guest-in-Residence, Unit One Allen Hall, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
UCLA HOTHOUSE Program: A Residency for the Creation of New Work
East West Players Conservatory Scholarship
Finalist, San Francisco Foundation Literary Awards
Jean Irwin Dance Memorial Scholarship
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