About

Kristina Wong is a Doris Duke Artist Award winner, Guggenheim Fellow and a Pulitzer Prize finalist in Drama. She’s a performance artist, comedian, actor and writer who has been presented internationally across North America, the UK, Hong Kong and Africa. She’s been a guest on late night shows on NBC, Comedy Central and FX. She starred in her own pilot presentation with Lionsgate for truTV. Her commentaries have appeared on American Public Media’s Marketplace, PBS, VICE, Jezebel, Playgirl Magazine, Huffington Post and CNN. She’s been awarded artist residencies from MacDowell, San Diego Airport and Ojai Playwrights Festival. She is currently the Artist-in-Residence at ASU Gammage and the Kennedy Center Social Practice Resident. Her work has been awarded with support from Creative Capital, The MAP Fund, Center for Cultural Innovation, National Performance Network, a COLA Master Artist Fellowship from the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, nine Los Angeles Artist-in-Residence awards, Center Theatre Group’s Sherwood Award, the Art Matters Foundation, and the Joan D. Firestone Commissioning Fund from En Garde Arts. Her recent “Kristina Wong for Public Office” was simultaneously a real life stint as a local elected official in Koreatown, Los Angeles and rally campaign show. That show was filmed for Center Theater Group’s Digital Stage. She's created and directed original theater works with residents of LA's Skid Row, the Bus Riders Union, undocumented immigrants, and most recently the formerly incarcerated Asian Pacific Islanders members of API Rise. Kristina founded Auntie Sewing Squad, a national mutual aid network of volunteers that sewed cloth masks for vulnerable communities during the Covid pandemic. Their book “The Auntie Sewing Squad Guide to Mask Making, Radical Care and Racial Justice is published by the University of California Press. Her role in the Auntie Sewing Squad is the subject of her currently touring “Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord”— a “New York Times Critics Pick” that premiered off-Broadway at New York Theater Workshop. The show won the Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle and Lucille Lortel Awards for “Outstanding Solo Performance”. “Auntie Kristina’s Guide to Asian American Activism” comes out Spring 2026 from Beaming Books and is co-written with the producers of Radical Cram School, the web series she has created for kids.

Kristina Wong is a Board member of Creative Capital, New York Theater Workshop and API Rise.

As an artist, the mediums I’ve used include solo theater shows, community theater projects, serving in public office, culture jamming, public pranks, viral videos, reality television, mutual aid, sewing and craft, and essays. I would describe my aesthetic at its best as subversive, humorous, and endearingly inappropriate. The unifying characteristic of my work is employing humor to explore difficult subjects and amplify marginalized experiences, using the premise of “autobiography” as a starting point of exploration. I criss-cross avant garde performance art, arts and crafts, comedy and cultural criticism. I am influenced by culture jammers like Banksy, Michael Moore and the Yes Men who subvert the performances of everyday life to make social commentary and change. I am also inspired by a long history of immersive theater and interactive performance art work, artists like Yoko Ono, James Luna, and Guillermo Gomez-Pena who use their bodies as the site of commentary.

The persona of “Kristina Wong” in my shows is the “know-it-all social justice warrior” who tackles oppression with tactics that are simplistic in idealism and often self-serving. This naivete unfolds in hilarious blunders, forcing Kristina Wong towards more poignant investigation, and always, no easy resolution. My nebulous identity continues to shift within the communities I live, evolve and interact with. I see my performance work as a humorous and ephemeral response to the invisible and visible boundaries that shape my world, rather than a hermetic declaration of my identity.

I’m interested in making art that responds to the current moment but doesn’t leave me angrier and more distraught than the world already does. Of late, reality has felt more satirical than the crafted fictitious satire I used to make on stage. As a once “wacky performance artist” I am learning that the most subversive thing I can do to disrupt the world is to sit inside sincerity, embrace earnestness, and shift the stage in which my ideas are read. I still believe that there is joy and humor in how I approach this work and am constantly wrestling with how to find joy, make grounded messaging that isn’t just reactively pushing back or magnifying anger without any release.

In my Artist Statement from 2008, I stated “I believe that as an artist, my job is not to ‘fix’ the wrongs of the world with easy answers, but instead, to further complicate the question by making the invisible—visible, and hopefully, creating some space for public discourse.” Now as we live through the battering of democracy, a global pandemic, and unending socio-political and environmental crises, I’d like to amend that statement. Artists might not want the responsibility of fixing the world. Artists may just want to just make interesting art pieces for contemplation. But cultural shifts propel social movements forward, ultimately being what will dismantle white supremacy. Artists are the ultimate hope for real social change. Art does the work of social work, therapy, community building, education, and culture shifting to set the stage for legislative change.