janice POON 

Janice Poon is a Senior Lecturer (Playwriting and Dramaturgy) and Academic Project Officer in the School of Drama at The Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts. She is also the Artistic Director of Hong Kong Dramatists and a veteran theatre artist and cultural practitioner engaged in cross disciplinary and cross cultural playwriting, directing, dramaturgy, curating and theatre making, focusing on new play development and text-based theatre making. Her work is loaded with socio-political issues and concerns, and has been recognised with the Asian Cultural Council Lee Hysan Foundation Fellowship and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office of the British Government’s Chevening Scholarship. Devoted to cultural exchange between Hong Kong and the international theatre scene, Janice has been a resident artist at The Lark Play Development Center in New York and the Odin Teatret in Holstebro, Denmark, and is a frequent speaker and teaching artist at international theatre conferences and festivals. Her works have been presented in major cities in Europe, the U.S., Asia and mainland China. And Then, I Float was recognised with four major awards, nominated for the best play award at the Hong Hong Theatre Libre (2014), and invited as part of a cultural exchange project at the Schillertage festival in Mannheim, Germany (2015). Small Waisted (2016) won the Multi-cultural Short Plays Competition organised by the International Theatre Institute of UNESCO. Her recent three-year curatorial project Dramaturgy and Beyond co-curated with West Kowloon Cultural District embarked on unpacking the Dramaturgy of theatre making in Asia region.