Chinese Opera. Puppetry. Storyteller.

Chinese Opera star Kuang-Yu Fong will perform at The Cutting Room, one of New York City’s premier music spots. Her unrivaled performance of Chinese Opera is part of a presentation of The Thomas Paine Award that is dedicated to the Mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, who used his musical platform to enable societal and political change.

Kuang-Yu Fong majored in Chinese Opera at the Chinese Culture University in Taiwan, where she also taught for four years before coming to New York City in 1983. She received an M.A. in Educational Theater at N.Y.U and became a resident artist upon graduation. She has been a guest professor at the Chinese Opera Academy in Beijing since 1998 and a visiting graduate professor at the University of Maryland in 2008. She was an assistant professor Pace University till 2012.

Ms. Fong has toured and taught all over the United States and in Asia and Europe.

She is the founder of Chinese Theatre Workshop (1995) and Chinese Theatre Works (2001), with whom she conceived, wrote and directed dozens of original, innovative productions, many of which have been honored with awards, including: “Toy Theater Peony Pavilion,” “Three Women, Many Plays,” “Tiger Tales” and “Songs From the Yellow Earth.”

Ms Fong has written numerous articles for scholarly journals and for Chinese language magazines. Her first book (co-authored with Stephen Kaplin) is Tabletop Theater: Puppetry for Small Places (2003). She translated Dr. Nellie McCaslin’s book Shows on the Shoestring into Chinese.

Ms. Fong has also been a panelist for New York State Council On The Arts, Lower Manhattan Council Foundation and Asian American Arts Alliance. She was the first Asian-American to elected to the board of UNIMA-USA. Founding in 1966, the North American Center of Union Internationale de la Marionnette, is part of the oldest international theatre organization in the world, founded in 1929. The organization's mission is to promote international understanding and friendship through the art of puppetry.

For more information, visit https://chinesetheatreworks.org/.