My portrait of “New York actor Thom Sesma’s Makeup Transformation into Scar in The Lion King” is featured in New York City: IN FOCUS, Vol. 2, the NYC Health and Hospitals Corporation’s Art Collection Photographic Exhibition, currently on view in the main lobby/atrium of Bellevue Hospital Center, 462 First Avenue in New York through July 14, 2011.

Celebrating over seventy-five years of having public art in hospitals, the NYC Health and Hospitals Corporation’s Art Collection proudly presents their traveling photographic exhibition, New York City: IN FOCUS, Vol. 2. This exhibition is a modern take on the 1950’s photographic exhibit, Family of Man. The exhibit features a collection of black and white, color, and digital prints that focus on different aspects of iconic imagery; architecture, landscape, culture, and people through-out the five boroughs and snapshots of the NYC experience.

Justin Lin (Photo by Lia Chang)

Filmmaker Justin Lin, who is responsible for Universal’s mega-successful FAST AND FURIOUS franchise has just acquired film rights to David Henry Hwang’s critically acclaimed comedy CHINGLISH hailed by TIME Magazine as the BEST PLAY of 2011.

CHINGLISH, a romantic comedy with a timely, political spin debuted at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre and follows its Broadway run with an international tour beginning at Berkeley Repertory Theatre this fall. Lin will direct and produce the film for his company, Barnstorm Pictures.

“As soon as I saw CHINGLISH on Broadway, I began to envision this smart and insightful cross-cultural comedy as a film. I’m excited about working with David to bring this very timely story to the screen, ” said Lin.

“I’ve loved Justin’s work ever since he burst on the scene with Better Luck Tomorrow, and it feels very right to be collaborating with him on the movie verision of my play, said playwright Hwang, a Tony Award winner and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist. Hwang will write the screenplay and is set to co-produce the film with Bobbi Thompson.

Click here for the Lia Chang Articles Archive and here for the Lia Chang Photography Website.

Last night, I got a taste of Christmas in June, Desi style, at The Wild Project in the East Village, where Bakwas Bumbug, an electrifying musical reinvention of A Christmas Carol, told thru the looking glass of NYC Immigrants and Hyphenated America, composed by Samrat Chakrabarti and featuring a book and lyrics by Sanjiv Jhaveri and Samrat Chakrabarti, is being presented as a 70 minute workshop production through June 26, 2011.

Presented by Desipina and Co. (Rehana Lew Mirza, Artistic Director & Rohi Mirza Pandya, Producing Director), Samrat Chakrabarti and Sanjiv Jhaveri’s Bakwas Bumbug is a delicious treat, poignant, touching, and laugh out loud funny.

Bakwas Bumbug , the first Indian American full length musical written, composed & performed by the Diaspora,...

In Soham Mehta’s Fatakra starring Samrat Chakrabarti, Meena Serendib, Ritik Goyal, Raj Vats and Conrad Gonzales, Chakrabarti gives a soulful performance as Naveen, a tailor who left his wife and son in India to chase his dreams in America. During Naveen’s reunion with his family after a much belated homecoming, he realizes he has a lot to make up for. Now he must learn from his son’s favorite hero, Arjuna, if he hopes to reconcile with his estranged family. Chakrabarti also composed the score for Fatakra, Mehta’s haunting and powerful meditation on longing, loss and family.

Born in India and raised since the age of four in Texas, South Asian American theater and film artist Soham Mehta was bitten by the acting bug, performing in his first play when he was eight years old.

As Mehta continued collecting stage credits over the next twenty years, his interest gravitated towards writing and directing. Mehta studied theater and computer science as an undergraduate at the University of Texas at Austin. No stranger to multi-tasking, Mehta founded Shunya, a Houston-based theater troupe dedicated to providing a voice to the South Asian American experience, and spent the early part of his professional life working in technology by day and directing plays by night. After leading the troupe for four years, Mehta returned to Austin to pursue his MFA in film production as a Warren Skaaren Fellow.

As the founder of Shunya, Mehta...

Chinglish, the critically acclaimed new comedy by Tony Award-winning and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist David Henry Hwang (M. Butterfly), will make its Broadway premiere in the Fall of 2011 at a Shubert Theatre to be announced, following its world premiere production at Goodman Theatre in Chicago this summer. Casting for the Broadway show will be announced soon.

“This is a very funny, very timely play,” said producer Jerry Frankel. “Jeffrey Richards and I are thrilled to bring David Henry Hwang back to Broadway.”

“This is a very funny, very timely play,” said producer Jerry Frankel. “Jeffrey Richards and I are thrilled to bring David Henry Hwang back to Broadway.”

Chinglish is about the unpredictable complications that ensue when an American businessman, despite his self-possessed cultural ignorance, seeks to expand his market by forging a relationship with government officials in a major Chinese city. Although he has hired an Australian entrepreneur who has lived in China to assist him, he soon finds that the complexities of such a venture far outstrip the expected differences in language, customs and manners – and calls into questions even the most basic assumptions of human...