Jean Yoon is well known in the Toronto arts and Korean-Canadian communities as an actor, playwright, and theatre artist. She was born in Illinois but raised in Toronto where she currently resides. Yoon is Seoul Babe/Artistic Director of Loud Mouth Asian Babes, a theatre company that is committed to the development of new Canadian drama by, for, and about Asian women. In recent years, Yoon has played the role of the mother in the CBC television series “Kim’s Convenience.”
Drama
The Kyopo Trilogy. Part 1: Sliding for Home. Part 2: Borders
Toronto: Playwrights Union of Canada, 1996.
Publisher’s Synopsis (from the Playwrights Guild of Canada website)
Frenetic adventures of a Korean Canadian, a ‘Kyopo’, a not-quite-Korean Korean from Seoul, 1983, baseball and the family reunification programme to 1987 in the Korean minority zone of The People’s Republic of China. Theatre for the dis/oriented and culturally confused.
Drama
The Yoko Ono Project
With instruction poems, music, and other texts by Yoko Ono.
Frederiction, N.B.: Broken Jaw Press, 2002.
PS8597 .O4 Y64 2002
Publisher’s Synopsis
Quirky, obsessed, passionate, provocative, The Yoko Ono Project is a multimedia extravaganza that highlights the experience of three Asian Canadian women as filtered through and magnified by the icon of Yoko Ono. A celebration of the art, strength and unbridled imagination of “the most famous undiscovered artist in the world”, The Yoko Ono Project is an inventive melding of music, performance and multimedia, that explodes myths and challenges perceptions about one of the most controversial modern artists.
Anthologies (Drama)
“Hongbu and Nolbu: The Tale of the Magic Pumpkins”
In Seven Contemporary Plays From the Korean Diaspora in the Americas, ed. and with an introduction by Esther Kim Lee. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012, 151-194.
PS634.2 .S479 2012
Anthologies (Drama)
“Yes Yoko Solo”
In Love + Relasianships: A Collection of Contemporary Asian-Canadian Drama. Volume 2, ed. Nina Lee Aquino. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2009, 1-128.
PS8309 .A75 L68 2009
Anthologies
Han Kut: Critical Art and Writing by Korean Canadian Women
Korean Canadian Anthology Collective, ed.
Toronto: Inanna Publications and Eduation, 2007.
PS8235 .K67 H36 2007
Includes Jean Yoon’s “Halmonee”, and, “White Life.”
Selected Criticism and Interpretation
Lee, Esther Kim. “”Patient Zero”: Jean Yoon and Korean Canadian Theatre.” In Asian Canadian Theatre, ed. Nina Lee Aquino and Ric Knowles. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2011, 62-78.
PS8089.5 .A8 A835 2011
Links
Jean Yoon profile by Anne Northof in the Canadian Theatre Encyclopedia
Publisher Inanna Publications
Publisher Broken Jaw Press
Yoon profile from the Playwrights Guild of Canada website.