Jasmine Lee-Jones

Jasmine Lee-Jones exploded onto the London theater scene in 2019 with her debut play, seven methods of killing kylie jenner. A sharply provocative, wildly funny story about a self-proclaimed Twitter activist, Cleo, and her best friend, Kara, the play follows the two friends as they negotiate their increasingly entangled offline and online identities, considering the complex and often discomfiting intersections of body image, colorism, cultural appropriation, and queerness in contemporary culture. Lee-Jones’s sophomore play, Curious (2021), picks up many of these same concerns. By turns zingy and tender, whimsical and furious, Curious excavates the racial politics of performance in Britain from the eighteenth century to the present. It is a powerfully original piece of storytelling and a moving meditation on desire, loneliness, and the invisibility of Black women, and particularly Black women artists, in history. Already widely recognized as a trailblazer and an important voice in global theater, Lee-Jones is the recipient of an Alfred Fagon Award (2019), a Charles Wintour Award for Most Promising Playwright (2019), and a Critics’ Circle Theatre Award for Most Promising Playwright (2019). She lives in London.