Susan Soon He Stanton - Meet the Playwright of 'Today Is My Birthday'
Susan Soon He Stanton is a playwright, television writer, and screenwriter based between New York and London, from ‘Aiea, Hawai‘i.
Susan is a producer/writer for HBO’s Succession, for which she has won a WGA and Peabody Award. Upcoming television work includes HBO/Sister Picture’s THE BABY, Amazon’s Modern Love, Amazon/Annapurna’s Dead Ringers, Hulu/Element Pictures/BBC’s Conversation with Friends adapted from the novel by Sally Rooney, as well as several projects in development.
She received a Feature Film Development Grant and Screenwriting Award from the Sloan Foundation. Films include Bushwick Beats, Dress (winner of 2014 Hawai‘i International Film Festival Audience Award), and others.
Plays include we, the invisibles (Actors Theatre of Louisville Humana Festival), Today Is My Birthday (Page73, Artists Rep), Both Your Houses (ACT New Strands/ Crowded Fire), Takarazuka!!! (Clubbed Thumb, East West Players), Cygnus (WP Theater Pipeline), Solstice Party! (Live Source), The Things Are Against Us (Washington Ensemble Theatre), Navigator (Honolulu Theatre for Youth), and more.
She is an inaugural recipient of the Venturous Playwrights Fellowship with the Lark, and an inaugural recipient of the Lark’s Van Lier Fellowship. She is a two-time Sundance Institute’s Theater Lab Resident Playwright. Writing groups and residencies past and present include New Dramatists, Playwrights Center Core Writer Fellowship, the Dorothy Strelsin New American Writers Group at Primary Stages, Public Theater’s Emerging Writers Group, SoHo Rep Writer-Director Lab, Women’s Project Lab, P73’s Interstate 73, Berkeley Rep Ground Floor, MaYi Playwrights Lab, The Civilians R&D Group, Hedgebrook, and more.
Awards and honors include Leah Ryan FEWW, Kilroys’ List 2015-2017, Southern Rep’s Ruby Prize Runner-up, Susan Glaspell Prize Finalist, a Susan Smith Blackburn nomination, Po’okela Award, and a NET Partnership Grant. From Kumu Kahua Theatre, she has been awarded the Hawai’i Prize and Resident Prize. Commissions include Yale Rep, American Conservatory Theater/Crowded Fire, South Coast Rep, Ensemble Studio Theatre, and others. She has worked as a writing consultant for Disney Theatrical Entertainment and Disney Creative Entertainment.
She has taught playwriting at UT Austin’s MFA Program, SUNY Purchase, New York University, Yale University, as well as various other institutions regionally and internationally. Susan holds a BFA from NYU Tisch’s Dramatic Writing program and an MFA from Yale School of Drama, where she received the Audrey Woods Fellowship and the Eugene O’Neill Memorial Scholarship.