Kristina Sheryl Wong
Kristina Sheryl Wong is a writer, solo performer, actor, educator, and filmmaker. She is the writer/ performer of two solo shows, "Miss Chinatown 2nd Runner Up" and "Free?". She has also created and performed numerous short theatrical solo pieces and public performance installations. Her first solo show, "Miss Chinatown 2nd Runner Up" was commissioned for development by the TeAda Works New Works Festival ("An LA Times' "Best Bet"). She was also recently commissioned by LA's Mark Taper forum to create a piece for "LAsians", part of the Asian Theater Workshop.
A former field news reporter for KPFK radio, she produced and directed her first short documentary, "Beat the Bus" with Visual Communications' "Armed with a Camera" Fellowship. The documentary has screened in LA and San Francisco. She's the notorious webmistress behind www.bigbadchinesemama.com, a mock mail order bride site visited by perverts, academics, activists and klansmen worldwide. She is published in the Harper Collins' Yell-oh Girls Anthology and Northeastern University Press' Catching A Wave anthology.
Kristina is working on her first novel, "Between the Peaks" thanks to support from the Rosenthal PEN USA Emerging Voices Fellowship. As an actor, Kristina has improv training from the Groundlings and has performed with Cold Tofu, OPM, Mao's Kids, Toxic Shock Stage and others. She was part of the 2002 San Francisco Fringe Festival OPM cast crowned "Best of the Fringe" and continues to write sketch comedy for OPM. Her work has been noted in such publications as the Village Voice, LA Weekly, SF Examiner, the PBS Bookshow, Ms. Magazine, and Bitch Magazine among others. Her work appears on the syllabi of University classes throughout the country. She has presented at university classes and panels all over California.
She works as the Artistic Director of the Asian American Teen Theater Company, creating educational theater with teens about HIV/AIDS. Kristina graduated from UCLA and has double degrees in English with Creative Writing and World Arts and Cultures, with a minor in Asian American Studies.
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Artistic Statement
Using mediums like websites, performance, visual art, video, public pranks, and fiction enable Kristina to explore human and political themes on different levels while accessing various audience demographics. Kristina is interested in creating work that challenges herself and her audience to make discoveries together. She is interested in revealing aspects of the human experience with her trademark quirkiness and always subverting the boundaries of the genres that she uses. Crediting filmmaker/writer Michael Moore as her major inspiration, Kristina believes great art should generate dialogue by offending, dissenting, and shocking rather than by handing out simplified conclusions. Some of the themes that have inspired past work are family, sexuality, failure, pride and memory.
In some of Kristina's recent writings and performances, she playfully embraces stereotypes to let her audiences react to what they see as true or untrue to their realities. This tactic also challenges double-standards and prejudice she has encountered by fellow Asian Americans. As an artist who happens to be both Chinese American and a woman, she questions the obligation of her work needing to be "representative" of all Chinese American women. She rejects that a single artist must take on the responsibility of representing her "community" but does not deny that she is a member of the (ethnic, gender) communities she challenges.