Kristina Wong

Kristina Wong’s artistic instincts surfaced early. Born in San Francisco to an accountant mother and an insurance salesman father, she is a third-generation Chinese American whose grandmother immigrated from a village near Kaiping county in the 1930s. After speech class at an all-girls Catholic high school, she enrolled at UCLA, where her senior project became her first breakout: “Big Bad Chinese Mama,” a fake mail-order bride website that satirized the fetishization of Asian women. Optimized to appear alongside searches for Asian porn and filled with abrasive, defiant biographies of real women, the project set the template for a career spent turning racist stereotypes into comedy. She graduated in 2000 with double degrees in English and World Arts and Cultures and a minor in Asian American Studies, working stints as an eBay vendor, restaurant hostess, and $10/hour art non-profit employee along the way.

Wong built her reputation as a solo theater performer, performance artist, and actor whose feminist, satirical work confronts race, sex, and privilege through the lens of the Asian-American experience. Her creative range reached a national audience through the New York Times’ “Off Color Comedy” series in October 2014 and an appearance in the premiere episode of Myx TV’s first original reality series, “I’m Asian American and….”

In 2021, she transformed her pandemic experience organizing the “Auntie Sewing Squad,” hundreds of volunteers sewing masks, into “Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord.” The play became a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and earned Wong the 2022 Lucille Lortel Award and Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Solo Show, plus Drama Desk and Off-Broadway Alliance nominations. Earlier honors include the 2006 Creative Capital Award and the 2019 Center Theatre Group’s Dorothy and Richard E. Sherwood Award.

Beyond the stage, Wong brings her civic energy to public service: as of 2019, she has served as an elected representative of the Wilshire Center Sub-district 5 Koreatown Neighborhood Council in Los Angeles. She returned to UCLA as a commencement speaker in 2008 and again in 2014 for the student-initiated Asian Pacific Islander graduation.