Dispatches from Quarantine Presents: Kristina Wong in Conversation with Rebecca Solnit

Kristina Wong is a Doris Duke Artist Award winner, Guggenheim Fellow and a Pulitzer Prize finalist in Drama. She’s a performance artist, comedian, actor and writer who has been presented internationally across North America, the UK, Hong Kong and Africa. She’s been a guest on late night shows on NBC, Comedy Central and FX. She starred in her own pilot presentation with Lionsgate for truTV. Her commentaries have appeared on American Public Media's Marketplace, PBS, VICE, Jezebel, Playgirl Magazine, Huffington Post and CNN. She’s been awarded artist residencies from MacDowell, San Diego Airport and Ojai Playwrights Festival. She is concurrently the Artist-in-Residence at ASU Gammage and the Kennedy Center Social Practice Resident until 2026. Her work has been awarded with support from Creative Capital, The MAP Fund, Center for Cultural Innovation, National Performance Network, a COLA Master Artist Fellowship from the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, nine Los Angeles Artist-in-Residence awards, Center Theatre Group’s Sherwood Award, the Art Matters Foundation, and the Joan D. Firestone Commissioning Fund from En Garde Arts. Her recent “Kristina Wong for Public Office” was simultaneously a real life stint as the elected Sub-district 5 representative of Wilshire Center Koreatown Neighborhood Council and rally campaign show. That show was filmed for Center Theater Group’s Digital Stage where she’s also a Creative Collective member. She's created and directed original theater works with residents of LA's Skid Row, the Bus Riders Union, undocumented immigrants, and most recently the formerly incarcerated Asian Pacific Islanders members of API Rise. Kristina founded Auntie Sewing Squad, a national mutual aid network of volunteers that sewed cloth masks for vulnerable communities during the Covid pandemic. Their book “The Auntie Sewing Squad Guide to Mask Making, Radical Care and Racial Justice is published by the University of California Press. Her role in the Auntie Sewing Squad is the subject of her currently touring “Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord”— a “New York Times Critics Pick” that premiered off-Broadway at New York Theater Workshop. The show won the Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle and Lucille Lortel Awards for “Outstanding Solo Performance”.|Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than twenty books on feminism, western and urban history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and catastrophe. Her most recent publication is the climate anthology co-edited with Thelma Young Lutunatabua titled Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility. Other books include Orwell’s Roses,Recollections of My Nonexistence, Hope in the Dark; Men Explain Things to Me; and A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster. A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she writes regularly for the Guardian and Lithub and serves on the board of the climate group Oil Change International.