Dawn Akemi Saito

Dawn Akemi Saito is an actor, writer, movement artist, and director. Her performance credits include Suns Are Suns, Blood Cherries, HA, Knock on the Sky, Hiroshima Maiden, Arden/Ardennes, My House Is Collapsing Toward One Side, Deshima, Memory Retrograde, and Suicide Forest. Her work has been performed at the Walker Art Center, Orpheum Theatre (Graz, Austria), Berkshire Theater Festival, Whitney Museum, Dance Theater Workshop, New York Theater Workshop, La MaMa, Electric Lodge, and Public Theater. She has worked with artists such as JoAnne Akalaitis (Hartford Stage), Roman Paska (Public Theater, Théâtre du Rond-Point), Bill T. Jones (BAM), John Jesurun (Japan Society), Ping Chong (La Mama), Dan Hurlin (St. Ann’s Warehouse), Charles Mee (Dance Theater Workshop), Kristine Haruna Lee, Aya Ogawa, Maria Mileaf, Erik Ehn, Robert Woodruff, Fred Ho, Myra Melford, Jonathan Rosenberg, Sabrina Peck, Joseph Jarman, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Fiona Templeton. She is an artist in residence in the theater department program at Fordham University (Lincoln Center), where she has directed Macbeth, Jen Silverman’s Phoebe in Winter, Eisa Davis’ Bulrusher, and The Bacchae. She guest teaches at the National Theater Institute, Princeton University, and the graduate acting program at NYU, where she co-created Love Suicide/Hikikomori. She also cofounded and codirects the Bard Summer Theater Intensive in Berlin. Saito is the recipient of International Theater Institute’s Uchimura Prize, which is given to an individual or group outside Japan for a project that relates to Japanese theater, and a fellowship from the Asian Cultural Council to study butoh in Japan. She was born in Chicago and received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College.