Actor/ Singer / Mover / Maker

Eiko Moon-Yamamoto (she/they) was born in Tokyo to a Japanese and Korean family — two cultures with a complicated history between them. She grew up between Honolulu, where Pidgin became her third language, and a Central California farming town where her family were the only Asian-Americans. She has never quite belonged to one place, and has always carried more than one home. It is perhaps why she is drawn to stories: not only those that live in the margins, but the canonical works of the American theater that have too rarely been told through bodies like hers — and the belief that they are richer for it. Eiko has tested this conviction across the range — from Afong Moy, the first Chinese woman to immigrate to America, in Lloyd Suh's The Chinese Lady, to Elizabeth Condell in Lauren Gunderson's The Book of Will, to M'Lynn Eatenton in Steel Magnolias.

This commitment extends to the development of new works. They have collaborated with Playwrights Foundation, PlayOn Shakespeare, Magic Theatre, San Francisco Playhouse, Crowded Fire, Z Space, AlterLab, and Company One (Boston) — institutions at the forefront of expanding whose stories the American stage tells and how. Eiko is an Artistic Associate of Rainbow Zebra Productions at the Magic Theatre and a PlayGround SF company member. Beyond the rehearsal room, they have mentored young playwrights at The Ground Floor at Berkeley Repertory Theatre (Young Writers of Color Collective) and the Ruth Asawa School of the Arts — work that reflects the same belief in whose stories deserve to be told. The first in her family to earn a college degree, she holds a BA from UCLA and a BFA from California College of the Arts, San Francisco.

Selected credits include M'Lynn Eatenton in Steel Magnolias (Sierra Repertory Theatre); The House of Bernarda Alba (Oakland Theater Project); Cymbeline (San Francisco Shakespeare Festival); Jack's Mother in Into the Woods (San Francisco Playhouse); Emily Whitman in Follies (San Francisco Playhouse); Clue (San Francisco Playhouse); u/s Marmee & Aunt March, world premiere of Lauren Gunderson's adaptation of Alcott's Little Women (TheatreWorks Silicon Valley); and u/s Sugar & Letter Writer #2, Tiny Beautiful Things (San Francisco Playhouse). She is a proud member of SAG-AFTRA and the Ring of Keys coalition.

She learned Lindy Hop at the epicenter of its resurgence in Los Angeles, seeking out the old timers who first lived the music. She met her life partner on that dance floor — and their hapa son Kai carries more than one history, as she always has.

Aloha Nui Loa!