Naomi Iizuka (born 1965) is a playwright who creates non-linear storylines influenced by her multicultural background.
Iizuka's was born into a multiracial family, her mother was American Latina and her father Japanese. She was born in Tokyo and grew up in Japan, Indonesia, the Netherlands and Washington D.C. She currently lives in California.
Iizuka has her B.A. in Classics from Yale, and is a University of California, San Diego Alumna and also has a M.F.A from the UC San Diego. She has taught playwrighting at the University of Iowa where she lived for some time, as well as the University of Texas in Austin. She also was a professor of Dramatic Arts and Director of the Playwrighting Program at UC Santa Barbara until 2008 when she took over as the head of the M.F.A playwrighting program at UCSD.
Naomi Iizuka's most recent play, 17 Reasons (Why), was produced at Campo Santo + Intersection for the Arts and published by Stage and Screen in the anthology Breaking Ground: Adventurous Plays By Adventurous Theatres, edited by Kent Nicholson. Her other plays include 36 Views; Polaroid Stories; Language of Angels; War of the Worlds (written in collaboration with Anne Bogart and SITI Company); Aloha, Say the Pretty Girls; Tattoo Girl; andSkin. Ms. Iizuka's plays have been produced by Actors Theatre of Louisville; Berkeley Repertory Theatre; Campo Santo + Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco; the Dallas Theatre Center and Undermain Theatre in Dallas; Frontera@Hyde Park in Austin; Printer's Devil and Annex in Seattle; NYSF/Joseph Papp Public Theatre, GeVa Theatre, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Soho Rep, and Tectonic Theatre in New York; San Diego's Sledgehammer Theatre; Northern Light Theatre in Edmonton, Alberta; Alternate Theatre in Montreal; and the Edinburgh Festival. Her plays have been workshopped by San Jose Rep, GeVa Theatre, Bread Loaf, Sundance Theatre Lab, A.S.K. Theatre Projects, the McCarter Theatre, Seattle's A Contemporary Theatre, the Bay Area Playwrights' Festival, Midwest PlayLabs, En Garde Arts/P.S. 122, and New York Theatre Workshop.
Ms. Iizuka is currently working on commissions from the Guthrie Theater, Actors Theatre of Louisville, the Kennedy Center, the Children's Theatre of Minneapolis, and the Mark Taper Forum. She is a member of New Dramatists and the recipient of a Whiting Award, a Rockefeller Foundation MAP grant, a Gerbode Foundation Fellowship, an NEA/TCG Artist-in-Residence grant, a McKnight Fellowship, a PEN Center USA West Award for Drama, the Stavis Award from the National Theatre Conference, Princeton University's Hodder Fellowship, and a Jerome Playwriting Fellowship. Ms. Iizuka has taught playwriting at the University of Iowa and the University of Texas, Austin, and currently teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara.