Actor, Writer, Educator

Who ARE They?

Tom Zhang (They/Them) is an actor and theater-maker dedicated to creating performances that use humor to explore race relations and American identity. As an actor, singer, and writer, their works focus on telling stories typically left out of mainstream entertainment, which currently means telling jokes about their parents and growing up in Florida. Tom has great comedic timing, which you can tell because they graduated from CalArts with their Master of Fine Arts in Acting in the middle of a pandemic. After concluding their appointment as the inaugural Emory Arts Fellow in Theater at Emory University, Tom headed up to North Carolina to serve as the 2023-2024 Artist in Residence at Duke Theater, where they are teaching and just premiered a new immersive play, DEI: Discovering Everyone’s Issues. They spend the rest of their time writing, devising, and performing plays about Asian American identity, stereotypes, and how the Grinch is, in fact, Asian (okay, one play about the Grinch, but still).