about

Photo credit: JMA Photography

Sam Chanse is the author of plays including What you are now, Trigger, Monument, or Four Sisters (A Sloth Play), The Opportunities of ExtinctionFruiting BodiesThe Other InstinctLydia’s Funeral Videoabout that whole dying thing, and Asian American Jesus. Her work has been developed and/or produced with the La Jolla Playhouse, the Lark, Ars Nova, the Civilians, Ensemble Studio Theater/Sloan Project, NAATCO, The Public Theatre, Magic Theatre, Boston Court, New York Stage & Film, Engarde Arts, Ma-Yi Theater, Cherry Lane, Leviathan Lab, Broken Nose, 24 Hour Plays, and the Ojai Playwrights’ Conference, and is published by Kaya Press (Lydia’s Funeral Video) and TCG (The Kilroys List).  

She is a resident playwright of New Dramatists, a recent Lark Venturous Fellow, and a member of the Ma-Yi Writers Lab. She was recently a participant in New York Stage and Film’s inaugural NYSAF NEXUS project.

A past fellow at MacDowell, Cherry Lane, Sundance Theatre Institute, and Playwrights Realm , she has also received residencies and commissions from La Jolla Playhouse, NAATCO, Djerassi, SPACE at Ryder Farm, EST/Sloan, Merrimack Repertory Theatre, University of Rochester’s International Theatre Program, Ma-Yi/the Flea, and the SF Arts Commission. She is an alum of Ars Nova’s Play Group, the Civilians R&D Group, and the Lark’s New York Stage & Film Vassar Retreat.

As an educator, she has taught writing and playwriting at Columbia University, New York University, the University of Rochester, and elsewhere. A native New Yorker, she was based in San Francisco for several years, when she served as artistic director of Kearny Street Workshop and co-director of Locus Arts, and developed work as a writer and performer at Bindlestiff, AATC, Playground, standup spots, and other artistic homes. She was a writer on ABC’s The Good Doctor (seasons 4-6), and is a member of Dramatist Guild and WGA. MFA: Columbia University and NYU/Tisch GMTWP. 

Artist Statement

I consider my plays to be deep dives into unfigureoutables, landing in unresolved, ambiguous places. My work explores intersections and collisions of race, gender, science & technology, and centers characters occupying some kind of marginal space – this has always been my natural impulse, part of my own perspective moving through the world, but in doing so I hope to contribute to efforts to illuminate and elevate marginalized voices – to tell stories that broaden and deepen our sense of what it is to be human, and human in this particular world. My work is inherently political (which is true of all work; still, sometimes needs to be said).

As a multiracial and Asian American woman who has regularly stumbled on checkboxes, I’ve always been preoccupied with authenticity – constantly hungering for it, and constantly suspicious of any claim on it. So my work also seeks to explore and complicate notions of Asian Americanness, hybridness, and Americanness. I’m also curious about our evolving humanity – how who we are on a contemporary today level intersects with who we are on a primal level, and with who we are becoming.

I try to write the kind of theater I love and desperately need – theater that challenges and transforms our perspective, that rouses and deepens our compassion, that connects us to one another, that wakes us up.