JI WON JEON

Biography

Ji Won Jeon (she/her) is a South Korean theatre director and educator with an international career. Born and raised in South Korea, Ji Won has lived in diverse cities over the past decade, including Seoul, South Korea; Shanghai, China; Los Angeles, CA; Chicago, IL; Saratoga Springs, NY; and East Lansing, MI.

As a theatre artist, Ji Won is committed to the power of theatre and art as catalysts for meaningful conversations that drive social change. She views theatre as a unique medium capable of challenging perceptions of reality and the social structures we inhabit. Her work focuses on telling stories that reveal the essence of human emotions and celebrate the vulnerability of the human condition, approached through diverse cultural perspectives.

Ji Won's current research project, Silent Clamor, is a devised physical theatre production that explores the long-silenced stories of the "comfort women"—victims of sexual slavery by Japanese Imperial forces during 1932–1945. The project seeks to address the erasure of this gender-based violence while highlighting theatre's potential to foster public awareness and inspire activism. Her main research question for the project focuses on the ethical representation of staging trauma using non-textual mediums.

Ji Won holds a B.A. in Theatre and a B.A. in Visual and Performing Arts Studies from the University of Southern California. She earned her M.F.A. in Directing from Northwestern University. Since September 2024, she has served as a co-founder and board member of the Chicago-based Alien Theatre Company.

As an educator, Ji Won has taught at Northwestern University, Skidmore College, and Michigan State University, where she is currently a Research Associate in Directing. At MSU, she developed and directed the department’s inaugural MFA New Play Commission, Stevie and The Real World by Iraisa Ann Reilly.

Her favorite directing credits include Peerless, Water by the Spoonful, A Christmas Carol, Buried Child, Polaroid Stories, Kiss of the Spider Woman, Armstrong’s Moon, Ubu Roi Project, The History Boys, No Exit, and The Pillowman.

Upcoming Projects: Inching Towards Yeolha (April 2025) and Silent Clamor (Summer 2025).

ARTIST STATEMENT

"For those who have forgotten their history, there is no future"

This is a famous Korean adage that nearly everyone born and raised in South Korea has grown up with. While I was not fully aware of its impact on my artistic journey, this idea has been effortlessly assimilated into the core of my work as an artist. Indeed, my work in theatre and visual art has always been centered around this idea of individual and collective cultural history that makes us who we are today and allows us to move forward from the past.

Ranging from spontaneous Korean traditional street theatre to immersive physical theatre, all of my work in theatre can be seen as a kind of ritual that demands call and response from the audience, asking them to be both physically and psychologically engaged as a community. In this communal space, each of the audience members brings their own history, and we find sometimes surprising, pleasant, fascinating, terrifying, or saddening threads that connect us all. Because of this unique aspect in theatre, I believe while it may have less societal impact than mass media, theatre has the greatest potential to leave the biggest impact on the audience on an individual level that would question our old assumptions and facilitate actions for change.

Therefore, I as a theatre artist am committed to provide a full body sensation and instinctive experience of any given story where the audience possesses an agency to create new narrative and interpretation. Thanks to my background as a visual artist and illustrator, I am a strong visual storyteller who engages the actors’ physical body as a main tool to create instinctual interpretation of a story. I strive to create work that can stimulate all five human senses—visual, auditory, gustatory, textile, and olfactory senses—in order to create immersive experiences and immediate and long-lasting visceral responses from the audience.

Although we cannot currently engage our physical presence in a traditional theatre space, I take this obstacle as a further invitation for innovating new forms of theatre. I continue to offer the audience an agency in creating their own narrative and a theatrical experience by embracing multimedia and aspects of live virtual reality video games. In doing so, the audience will be given an opportunity to decide which character to follow or which camera to follow spontaneously no matter the character of their choice is in a scene or not at the moment. I continue to commit myself to actively listening to what my people have to say and telling stories from their voices that need to be uplifted.

Storytelling has always been one of the most natural and intuitive human impulses, and I truly believe the stories we tell about ourselves are formative of who we become as an individual, as a community and as a society. The stories we tell about our culture will then reveal to us to a better direction for our country and the world at large.