Naomi Iizuka

Campo Santo and Naomi Iizuka have enjoyed a decade’s long relationship.  The group collectively developed, produced and premiered four new plays from Naomi Iizuka in their fruitful and rare teamwork.  Campo Santo, in their  former resident home at Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco, produced plays by Iizuka from 1997 to 2007.  Plays included the West Coast premiere of Polaroid Stories, and the world premiere productions of Language of Angels, 17 reasons (why), and Hamlet: Blood in the Brain.  In addition to the premiere productions, together they helped in development of Iizuka’s Aloha, Say the Pretty Girls, Scheherazade, and the beginnings of this play Garuda’s Wing, among others. All of the plays produced have gone on to further life with productions throughout the country, in particular with multiple college and university productions in the Bay Area and beyond.

Naomi Iizukas’s plays have been produced at theatres nationwide including Berkeley Repertory Theatre, the Goodman, the Guthrie Theatre, the Kennedy Center, the Huntington Theater, the Public Theatre and at BAM’s Next Wave Festival, the Annenberg Center, and Yale Rep’s No Boundaries series. Her plays have been published by Overlook Press, Playscripts, Smith and Kraus, Dramatic Publishing, and TCG. 

Naomi lizuka was named the Berlind Playwright-in-Residence at Princeton University. She is an alumna of New Dramatists and the recipient of a PEN/Laura Pels Award, an Alpert Award, a Joyce Foundation Award, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Stavis Award from the National Theatre Conference, MAP, NEA/TCG Artist in Residence grant, McKnight Fellowship, PEN Center USA West Award for Drama, Hodder Fellowship, and a Jerome Fellowship. 

Iizuka's television and film credits as writer and producer span Michael Mann’s Tokyo Vice (HBO); to The Sympathizer from Viet Thanh Nguyen, directed by Park Chan Wook.

Campo Santo and Naomi Iizuka have enjoyed a decade’s long relationship.  The group collectively developed, produced and premiered four new plays from Naomi Iizuka in their fruitful and rare teamwork.  Campo Santo, in their  former resident home at Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco, produced plays by Iizuka from 1997 to 2007.  Plays included the West Coast premiere of Polaroid Stories, and the world premiere productions of Language of Angels, 17 reasons (why), and Hamlet: Blood in the Brain.  In addition to the premiere productions, together they helped in development of Iizuka’s Aloha, Say the Pretty Girls, Scheherazade, and the beginnings of this play Garuda’s Wing, among others. All of the plays produced have gone on to further life with productions throughout the country, in particular with multiple college and university productions in the Bay Area and beyond.  Language of Angels was later published in the theatre journal TheatreForum.

While, Iizuka was the Head of Playwrighting at the University of California at Santa Barbara, Naomi founded and produced an annual Summer New Plays Lab- that brought incredible artists from across the country together to both develop their own brand new works and too, to work with students in new play workshop intensives.  Artists through the years included Jessica Hagedorn, Jimmy Santiago Baca, and Iizuka herself, that Campo Santo developed brand new plays that were later premiered by Campo Santo.  While simultaneously developing these new plays, Iizuka and Campo Santo collectively trained UCSB students in new play creation intensives throughout the Summer schedule. The final year of the UCSB New Play Lab the two parties developed the play Hamlet: Blood in the Brain, which premiered later the next year in San Francisco.

Learn more about Naomi and Play On! Shakespeare!