Photo by Joseph O’Malley
playwright | filmmaker | performer | poeT | Translator
Stefani Kuo 郭佳怡 is a playwright/filmmaker/performer and native of Hong Kong and Taiwan. She received her M.F.A. from the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale and her B.A. in Theater Studies from Yale University.
Fluent in Cantonese, Mandarin, French, and English, she crafts multicultural, multilingual narratives for an international audience. She is a 2026-27 Van Lier Fellow with Rattlestick Theater. She was a 2024 MacDowell Fellow, Working Farm Resident with SPACE on Ryder Farm. She is under commission with the Atlantic Theater Company, Ensemble Studio Theater/Sloan, and has received commissions from Rubin Museum, Roundhouse Theater, and Yangtze Repertory. She is a member of Youngblood, EST’s Writers Group, and was a 2019 member of Interstate-73, Page 73’s Writers Group.
She is currently under commission with the Atlantic Theater Company, Ensemble Studio Theatre/Sloan, and has previously been commissioned by the Rubin Museum, Roundhouse Theater, and Yangtze Repertory.
Her play on the Hong Kong protests, Final Boarding Call was the winner of the 2021 Leah Ryan Fund for Emerging Women Writers’ Prize, and was presented in the 2025 Kendeda Festival at the Alliance Theater. Her play Wake was presented in the Langston Hughes Festival 2022 at Yale. Her play Pearl’s Beauty Salon was produced in May 2024 in the Carlotta Festival at Yale. Her play Pig was a 2025 Judith Champion Launch Commission from The Atlantic Theater. Her work in creative non-fiction, poetry, and translation has appeared in The New York Times, China Hands, Electric Literature, Outside, and more.
What the Living Do is her first foray into directing film. As a performer, she recently acted in short films Radical Kinship (dir. Sofi Taylor), Someday (dir. Justin Cheung) and A Natural History (dir. April Wen).
From April-September 2025, she spent 154 days hiking 2,650 miles from Mexico to Canada on the Pacific Crest Trail. She has hiked around the world on the Camino de Santiago, Tour du Mont Blanc, West Highland Way, the Vermont Long Trail, Colorado Trail, John Muir Trail, Hong Kong Maclehose Trail, and more.