Biography
Rena Heinrich is an assistant professor of theatre practice in critical studies at the USC School of Dramatic Arts and an affiliated professor of East Asian studies in the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. Her teaching and areas of expertise include interculturalism; race, representation, and gender in performance; postcolonial theatre; Asian and Asian American drama; acting; ethnography; and performance studies.
As an artist, her theatrical work has been produced in Los Angeles by the John Anson Ford Theatre, The Latino Theater Company, East West Players, Company of Angels, Playwrights’ Arena, TeAda Productions, Artists at Play, Casa 0101, and Highways Performance Space, among others. She has directed the nationally-touring production of Refugee Nation at Intermedia Arts/Pangea World Theater in Minneapolis and co-directed its critically acclaimed production at the Los Angeles Theatre Center. Her directorial work on So the Arrow Flies was presented internationally at the Arts Council Korea’s Performing Arts Series in Seoul, and her original production of Kokoro (True Heart) is featured in the Dramatist Play Service published version. As an actor, she has appeared on daytime and primetime television on FOX, USA, NBC and CBS.
Her current book project, Race and Role: The Mixed-race Asian Experience in American Drama explores the shifting identities of multiracial Asian figures in theatre from the late-19th century to the present day. She is a contributor to the anthology Shape Shifters: Journeys Across Terrains of Race and Identity (University of Nebraska Press) and to The Beiging of America: Personal Narratives about Being Mixed Race in the 21st Century (2Leaf Press/University of Chicago Press). Heinrich has been interviewed on PBS and MBC America, offered perspectives in podcast roundtables, and presented research at conferences across the United States.
Additionally, she has taught in the departments of Theater and Dance and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara and in the MFA program in Television, Film, and Theatre at California State University, Los Angeles. Heinrich is the 2018 recipient of the prestigious Michael D. Young Award from UCSB for successfully integrating scholarship with social activism in theatre. She continues her activism through current work in public history, collaborating with California State Parks to reexamine the histories and nomenclature of California’s public lands as well as the ways in which we think about access and public memory.