An acclaimed playwright and librettist, Professor David Henry Hwang is a Tony-Award winner, three-time OBIE-Award winner, Grammy-Award winner, and three-time Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama. Professor Hwang’s stage work includes the plays M. Butterfly, Chinglish, Yellow Face, Golden Child, The Dance and the Railroad, and FOB, as well as the Broadway musicals Aida, Flower Drum Song and Disney’s Tarzan. A professor at Columbia University School of the Arts, Professor Hwang is also Trustee of the American Theatre Wing, where he served as Chair, and a member of the Dramatist Guild Council. Recent honours include his induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2021 and his induction onto the Lucille Lortel Playwrights’ Sidewalk in 2022. Hailed as America’s most produced living opera librettist, Professor Hwang has written thirteen libretti, including five with composer Philip Glass. He also co-wrote the lyrics for “Solo” with the late pop music icon Prince. His newest musical, Soft Power (dir. Leigh Silverman) opened at New York’s Public Theatre in 2019. A collaboration with composer Jeanine Tesori, Soft Power has received a Grammy nomination for Best Musical Theatre Album and was a Finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Drama.
 

Joanna Mansbridge is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of English, CUHK. Her research spans contemporary theatre, performance studies, and film and appears in Contemporary Theatre Review, Public Culture, Theatre Research International, International Journal of Performing Arts and Digital Media, Modern Drama, Genre, and the Journal of Popular Culture. Her book Paula Vogel (University of Michigan Press, 2014) is the first book-length study of the Pulitzer-Prize winning American playwright. Her current research focuses on ecological approaches to theatre-making, urban studies, and intermedial performance. She is on the international advisory board for the performance studies journal, Performance Matters.

An Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of English, CUHK, Mike Ingham is a founder member of Theatre Action, a Hong Kong based drama group that specialises in action research on more literary drama texts. His current work focuses on intermediality studies between poetry and art song forms and is also co-writing a study of Hong Kong documentary film based on findings of a recent research project. Mike and his UK-based academic brother Richard are collaborating on a long-term Shakespearean language and verse study using fresh empirical data. Mike's work is multi-faceted and broad in scope, reflecting not just a wide range of interests and strengths, but also an empirical sense of fluid educational categories and a need for creative inter-disciplinarity.