“Kyoung has turned out to be simply the most talented theater practitioner of his generation that I have had the good fortune to work with. His plays are deeply original, conceptually erudite, funny and truly moving. They have a special quality as a result of his total theatrical expertise. He is knowledgeable about everything that goes into a production, from the script to the music, and the movement – be it realistic, mimetic or dance – and design. And lo and behold he has also turned out to be an exceptional actor’s director – which few writers are. What is special about his ability is his multifaceted grasp of how writing, directing, design, music, choreography and acting combine to tell a story. This is rare in American theater today, which often concentrates on the specialization of each craft to the exclusion of all the others. He is a writer/director who is fine-tuned to do important work.” — Lee Breuer
Kyoung H. Park is a North Korean playwright/director, born and raised in Santiago, Chile, currently living in unceded territory of the Lenape, colonially referred to as Brooklyn, New York. Kyoung has been writing plays for 25 years, directing for 15 and is the first Korean playwright from Latin America to be produced and published in the United States.
Kyoung began his practice in Chile as a teenage actor, concert pianist and filmmaker before studying Dramatic Writing at NYU and stumbling into non-profit theater at the Lark Play Development Center. After witnessing 9/11 and protesting the War on Terror, Park decided to research "Peace Culture in America Post-9/11" at Kyung Hee University's Graduate Institute of Peace Studies (South Korea) and continued his field research in political theater working with the Royal Court Theater (London), Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed (Rio de Janeiro), Young Jean Lee's Theater Company and Mabou Mines (New York) and as a UNESCO-Aschberg Laureate in Sanskirti Pratisthan (New Delhi). Kyoung worked for Korea Arts and Culture Education Service, a South Korean governmental collaboration between the Ministry of Culture and Ministry of Education and in 2008, he was a Visiting Professor of Theater and Performance at Kyung Hee University's School of English Language and Culture.
Kyoung returned to New York to pursue his MFA in Playwriting at Columbia University and founded Kyoung's Pacific Beat™ - a Peacemaking Theater™ company - to integrate his research in peace studies and theater. Since 2011, he has devised four full-length plays -- disOriented (“Kyoung’s most intensely personal play”—American Theatre Magazine), TALA ("an epic tale of the historical, hysterical, and personal" — New York Theater Review), PILLOWTALK (“very much of this moment”—The New York Times), NERO — and produced over 45 community-based, experimental projects including performances for new media. Kyoung is published in Seven Contemporary Plays from the Korean Diaspora in the Americas by Duke University Press, Observatorio Cultural by the Chilean National Council on the Arts, and he's been featured in ABC News/Univision, Lambda Literary, Howlround, The Brooklyn Rail, The Brooklyn Reader and The Korea Times. Kyoung has taught at Ewha Womans University (South Korea), DUOC (Santiago, Chile), University of Washington (Seattle), University Settlement (New York), guest lectured at Loyola University (New Orleans), Governors State University (Chicago) and spoken at Theater Communications Group (Washington DC), Association of Performing Arts Professionals (New York), Americans for the Arts (Minneapolis), Korea Arts Council (Seoul) and Festival Santiago a Mil (Santiago, Chile).
Kyoung's Pacific Beat™'s work centers stories of (im)migration, queerness, violence and the ways these intersect in communities of color. The company headlined the Consortium of Asian-American Theaters and Artists (CAATA) "Radical Acts" festival at Victory Gardens (Chicago), featured thrice in The Exponential Festival (Brooklyn) and was a resident company at Pregones/Puerto Rican Traveling Theater, Baryshnikov Arts Center, HERE, La MaMa, BRIC, The Bushwick Starr, LaGuardia Performing Arts Center, The Brick, The Tank, New Ohio Theater and Performance Project @ University Settlement.
Kyoung's Pacific Beat™ received a 2021 Innovation Award from American Express/APAP, a 2022 Innovation Award from the NYC Office for the Prevention of Hate-Crimes and was an inaugural cohort member of the 2023-2024 Brooklyn Arts Leadership Collaborative at The Brooklyn Museum. Internationally, Kyoung has been artist-in-residence at Centro Cultural Gabriela Mistral (Santiago, Chile), Global Arts Village (New Delhi), Vermont Studio Center and Soho Theatre's Writers' Hub (London).
Between 2024-2026, Kyoung's Pacific Beat™ dismantled its non-profit status and reorganized itself as a minority-owned, artist corporation in order to protect the intellectual property of Kyoung H. Park. In this new business model, K-Space resumed production of Kyoung's work to be distributed by its sister-company, KPB New York.
Kyoung was awarded the 2024 Leadership in Community-Based Theatre and Civic Engagement Award for Transformational Practice from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. He is recipient of numerous fellowships including the 2023 Rockwood Leadership Institute, 2021 Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship (Recommended Alternate), 2021 NYFA Incubator for Executive Leaders of Color, 2019-2020 Target Margin Arts Management Fellowship, 2019-2020 Dramatist Guild Fellowship, 2018-2020 APAP Leadership Fellowship, 2018-2019 Intercultural Leadership Institute Fellowship, 2017 Creative Mellon Fellowship, 2015-2017 Field Leadership Fund Fellowship, 2014 Target Margin Theater Inst. for Collaborative Theater-Making Fellowship and a 2004 Edward Albee Fellowship. He is a NYTW Usual Suspect, co-founder of The Sol Project (Obie Award) and alum of Ma-Yi Writer's Lab and Ensemble Studio Theater's Youngblood (Obie Award).
Kyoung has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, Ford Foundation, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Wallace Foundation, New York Community Trust, Stonewall Foundation, MAP Fund, Venturous Theater Fund, TCG, Brooklyn Arts Council, Howard Gilman Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Arvon Foundation (London), GK Foundation (South Korea) and has been a grant panelist for the NEA, TCG, NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, ART/NY and NALAC. Since its founding, Kyoung's Pacific Beat™ invested over $970,000 to support 400+ NYC-based artists of color, served 11,000+ audience members worldwide and became the first non-profit theater of color to provide union-rate wages in Flatbush, Brooklyn.
Kyoung holds an MFA in Playwriting from Columbia University (Dean's Fellow), MA in International Politics from Kyung Hee University’s Graduate Institute for Peace Studies and BFA in Dramatic Writing from New York University (Founder's Day Award). He presided the student council of all three schools and instituted funds for interdisciplinary arts collaborations both at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts and Columbia School of the Arts in partnership with Deans Mary Schmidt Campbell and Carol Becker. He has volunteered in the Steering Committee of GAPIMNY - the oldest, queer Asian organization in the United States, served as Director of Strategic Planning for 2G - an incubator for new Asian-American theater, was Team Leader of the Brooklyn Commune's Cultural Democracy and Representation Team, member of the Dramatist Guild's Devised Theater Committee and lead facilitator of the Mosaic Network and Fund's Learning Exchanges from 2020-2024, recognized with a NYC Mayoral Citation.
Kyoung became an American citizen in 2023 and continues his self-education in Buddhism, having made his refuge vows with His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India. He is guardian of She-Ra, a rescue pitbull, alongside his husband Daniel Lim.
Photography by Beowulf Sheehan