Jessica Hagedorn is a Filipino playwright, writer, poet, and multimedia performance artist. Her mixed media style often incorporates song, poetry, images, and spoken dialogue.
She received MacDowell Fellowships, which helped enable her to write the novel Dogeaters. She shows the complexities of the love-hate relationship many Filipinos in diaspora feel toward their past. The novel earned a 1990 National Book Award nomination and an American Book Award. In 1998 La Jolla Playhouse produced a stage adaptation. She is also the author of Toxicology, Dream Jungle, and The Gangster Of Love.
Hagedorn worked with playwrights and artists Robbie McCauley and Laurie Carlos as the collective Thought Music, which later expanded to include visual artist John Woo. Thought Music created a number of works including Teenytown (presented at La Mama in 1987) and class (presented at The Kitchen in 2000). Thought Music investigated race, class, sexism, and the role of immigrants in the United States. Hagedorn, with Thought Music and on her own, has also collaborated with Urban Bush Women on works including Heat and Lipstick.
Other publications include Danger And Beauty, a collection of poetry and prose, and Burning Heart: A Portrait Of The Philippines. She edited both volumes of Charlie Chan Is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction, and Manila Noir, a crime fiction anthology. She is currently working on the stage adaptation of The Gangster Of Love.
