Professor David Henry Hwang Honored by Dramatists Guild with Lifetime Achievement Award
Professor of Theatre and Playwriting Concentration Head David Henry Hwang will receive the Dramatists Guild’s 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award. The Guild’s highest honor recognizes distinguished lifetime achievement in theatrical writing, and the list of previous recipients includes some of the biggest names in the business, like Edward Albee, Adrienne Kennedy, Arthur Miller, Stephen Sondheim, and George C. Wolfe. The award will be presented to Hwang at the Guild’s annual awards ceremony on April 28.
“Over the last four and a half decades, David's ever-increasing body of work endures as one of the great contributions to the American theater canon,” Samuel D. Hunter, co-chair of the awards committee, said. “His generosity, grace, humor, craft and deep intelligence has profoundly influenced entire generations of theater artists, myself included. I'm thrilled to see what lies ahead for him.”
Hwang credits community activism and DEI as forces behind his career. “Back in 1978, Asian actors protesting ‘yellow face’ casting at the Public Theater led its founder, Joseph Papp, to look for plays for Asian actors. So I was the beneficiary of an affirmative action program, resulting in my first production when I was 22 years old in 1980,” Hwang said. “Back then, if you wanted to write about Asians for film or TV, you had to figure out a way to put a white guy at the center of the story.
“Fortunately, things have improved today, thanks to DEI programs like Papp’s,” Hwang continued. “‘Woke’ means telling our own stories, being authentic, and telling the truth. So I’m grateful to the Dramatists Guild for recognizing my artistic life, which has been made possible by DEI: Diversity, Excellence, and Inclusion.”
David Henry Hwang’s stage works include the plays M. Butterfly, Yellow Face, Chinglish and FOB, as well as the musicals Soft Power, Aida and Disney’s Tarzan. He has won the Tony Award, the Grammy Award, the OBIE Award and is a three-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama. He has been awarded with seven Honorary Doctorates. He is a Trustee of the American Theatre Wing, which he chaired from 2016–2021.