Damon Chua is a New York-based playwright, fiction writer, poet and producer.
Playwriting
Damon is an alumnus of The Public Theater Emerging Writers Group and Ma-Yi Theater’s Writers Lab in New York. His stint at The Public Theater was supported by a Time Warner Foundation grant. He is the recipient of a 2015 Dramatists Guild Fund #writechange scholarship and have received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Commissions include works for Adventure Theatre MTC, Climate Change Theatre Action, Compass Needle, New York City Children’s Theater and Pan Asian Repertory Theatre.
Currently published by Concord Theatricals (aka Samuel French), Plays for New Audiences and Smith & Kraus, Damon received an Ovation Award for Best New Play and has obtained support from UNESCO and the Durfee Foundation. Damon’s plays have been staged in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis, and presented in several states. They also have been seen in China, Jamaica and Singapore, among other places.
A sample of my interviews and Q&As - you can read them here, here, and here.
Fiction
Damon's short story Immunity was a finalist of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2017. Another piece - Mango - was included in Silverfish Book's Twenty-Two: New Asian Short Stories, published in 2016. His story Saiful and the Pink Edward VII formed part of the Singapore Noir anthology, published by Brooklyn-based Akashic Books. Other stories have appeared in the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Tall Tales Press, and the Straits Times.
Poetry
Damon’s anthology Traveler’s Tale and Other Poems was published in 2011 by Ethos Book. His poems have also been seen in the following collections: Journeys: Words, Home and Nation – Anthology of Singapore Poetry, Memories & Desires: A Poetic History of Singapore, and & Words: Poems Singapore and Beyond.
Producing
Damon was one of the creators and an executive producer of Devoted, a ten-part drama series completed in 2019 and currently streaming on the VIU platform in Asia. He has produced several movies, one of which was screened at the Cannes Film Festival. He has worked with several Asian directors, including Wong Kar-wai, who hired him as his Head of Business Development. Damon also helped to run Impact Pictures, a Los Angeles-based film production company that has produced several #1 movies at the North American box office. In addition, Damon was the Executive Director of Keen Company, an Off-Broadway theater company.
Other
Damon has an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business and a law degree from Oxford University. His LinkedIn profile is here.