Han Ong - Career Accomplishments and Awards

Career Accomplishments and Awards

In 1993 Ong was a winner of the Kesselring Prize for best new American plays for "Swoony Planet".

In 1994, Ong moved to New York where he received critical acclaim for his plays. He was praised by Robert Brustein, the artistic director of the American Repertory Theater and one of the most esteemed figures of the American stage. In 1997, at age twenty-nine, Ong was one of twenty-three winners of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowships; his grant was $200,000. Ong said in an interview with the Washington Post's Lonnae O’Neal Parker, “I hope this MacArthur Fellowship demonstrates the importance of self-determination and the hunger for improvement for people of . I didn’t take being a dropout as a measure of my intelligence or as a harbinger of my future.”

Ong’s works have been performed at venues such as the Highways Performance Space and Gallery and the Berkeley Repertory Theater in California; Joseph Papp Public Theater in New York; Portland Stage Company in Maine; Boston’s American Repertory Theater; and at the Almeida Theater in London. Ong collaborated with fellow Filipino American writer Jessica Hagedorn in 1993 to write a performance piece entitled "Airport Music" for the Los Angeles Festival.

Ong is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for Fiction and the TCG/NEA Playwriting Award. "Fixer Chao" was named a Los Angeles Times "Best Book of the Year" and was nominated for a Stephen Crane First Fiction Award. "The Disinherited" was nominated for a LAMBDA Book Award.

Although the MacArthur Foundation’s Genius Grant finished in 2002, Ong continues to write despite his lamentation that he is “a little poorer now." He has recently focused his efforts solely on novels and hopes to revisit the Philippines after more than twenty years of separation from his homeland.

Ong is a recipient of the 2010/2011 Berlin Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin.