Walter Byongsok Chon

regional managing editor

WALTER BYONGSOK CHON is a dramaturg, critic, translator, educator, and theatre scholar from South Korea. He is the Associate Professor of Dramaturgy and Theatre Studies at Ithaca College, U.S. During his sabbatical from Fall 2023 to Spring 2023, he was a Visiting Professor at the School of Drama at Korean National University of Arts. He served as dramaturg at the Yale Repertory Theatre, Yale School of Drama, the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center, the Great Plains Theater Conference, the Hangar Theatre, the Civic Ensemble, and the New York Musical Festival. He is the co-author (with Anne M. Hamilton) of Dramaturgy: The Basics (Routledge, 2023), a practical guidebook in Routledge’s The Basics series. His writings have appeared in Theater, Review, Praxis, The Korean National Theatre Magazine, The Korean Theatre Review, Asymptote, The Mercurian, Situations: Cultural Studies in the Asian Context, the volumes The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy and Diversity, Inclusion, and Representation in Contemporary Dramaturgy: Case Studies from the Field, and the on-line magazine The Theatre Times, for which he is serving as a co-managing editor for South Korea. His produced theatrical translations include Sam-Shik Pai’s Inching Towards Yeolha (Korean to English) and Charles Mee’s True Love (English to Korean). His Korean translation of “A Manifesto for the Future Stage,” developed at MetaLAB (at) Harvard, is published in the 2022 summer issue of The Korean Theatre Journal. He received the 2022 Grant for the Translation of Korean Literary Works from the Daesan Foundation. With this grant, he has translated four plays by South Korean playwright Myung-Wha Kim into English. He completed the project with English language translation consultant Anne Hamilton. He completed a Bogliasco Foundation Fellowship in Spring 2024. He has presented at various conferences, including ALTA, ASTR, ATHE, GSA, LMDA, MATC, NeMLA, and PTRS. He taught theatre at WU St. Louis, Yale School of Drama, University of Nebraska Omaha, Vassar College, and the Korean National University of Arts. Walter received his B.A. in English from Sungkyunkwan University in Korea, M.A. in theatre studies from Washington University in St. Louis, M.F.A. in dramaturgy and dramatic criticism from Yale School of Drama, and D.F.A from Yale School of Drama.