David Henry Hwang

David Henry Hwang was born in Los Angeles, California in 1957. He was the oldest of three children, and the only boy in his family. Hwang received his undergraduate degree at Stanford University, where he majored in English and produced his first-ever play. Hwang attended, but did not graduate from, the Yale School of Drama. His first play, FOB, premiered in 1980. He went on to write many other plays, including The Dance and the Railroad (1981), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and the Tony Award-winning M. Butterfly (1988). Hwang has also built a career writing for opera and musical theater, and worked on adaptations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida, among other projects. His most recent plays, Kung-Fu and Cain and Abel, premiered in 2014, the same year Hwang began working as director of the playwriting concentration at Columbia University School of the Arts.