Rick Shiomi is a Toronto-born theatre artist now based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and a leader in early Asian Canadian theatre movement in the 1980s. He credits his time spent in Vancouver in the 1970s, working with the Powell Street Festival in its early years, and later with the Redress movement, as what gave him the fuel for his early work as a playwright, including his first play, the award-winning Yellow Fever, premiered in San Francisco in 1982 by the Asian American Theater Company and the first Asian Canadian play (Canasian Artists Group, 1983) professionally produced in Canada. He moved to Minnesota in the 1990s and co-founded Mu Performing Arts, as well as the taiko group Mu Daiko, in Minneapolis. Although he has written over twenty plays, over the course of his career, his work has shifted from playwriting towards directing, and he has made many memorable contributions to Asian American theater as a director and artistic director, such as a production of Into the Woods set in Asia and The Mikado set in Edwardian England. Shiomi has received numerous awards for his work, including the McKnight Foundation Distinguished Artist Award (2015). Shiomi is now co-Artistic Director of Full Circle Theater Company, which has a multicultural, multiracial mandate. (June 2017)
