Rick Shiomi

Mu Artistic Director, Mu Daiko, Core Artistic Group, Board of Directors
As a playwright and director, Rick Shiomi has been one of the leading figures of the Asian American theater movement since the early 1980's. Relocating to Minnesota in the 1990's, he was one of the founders of Theater Mu and is presently the Artistic Director of the company under its new name, Mu Performing Arts.   

Mr. Shiomi's plays include the award winning Yellow Fever, Rosie's Cafe, Uncle Tadao, Play Ball, Mask Dance, The Raven In The Starfruit Tree, The Tale of the Dancing Crane and Song of the Pipa. He also co-authored The Walleye Kid with Sundraya Kase, Hmong Tiger Tales with Cha Yang, Temple of Dreams with Marcus Quiniones and The Magic Bus To Asian Folktales with Cha Yang and Jaz Canlas. He also co-authored the book for The Walleye Kid: The Musical. All of his plays since Mask Dance have been produced by Mu. Yellow Fever has been produced off-Broadway, in Japanese in Tokyo and at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Mr. Shiomi has had his plays produced by the major Asian American theater companies: Asian American Theater Company in San Francisco, Pan Asian Repertory in New York and East West Players in Los Angeles. Yellow Fever has also been published in the U.S. and Canada and Mask Dance appears in Bold Words: A Century of Asian American Writing, published by Rutgers University in 2001. He has taught playwriting at the David Henry Hwang Writers' Institute in Los Angeles and in the Many Voices Program at the Playwrights' Center in Minnesota. He has also written screenplays for film and television including the Canadian award winning dramatic series ENG.

Mr. Shiomi's directing credits include Mask Dance, Theater Mu's first full-length production, two segments of the River of Dreams trilogy, S.A.M. I Am, Tales of the Starfruit Tree, The Walleye Kid, The Tale of the Dancing Crane, Song of the Pipa , Export Quality and Maui and the Soul of the Sun. He has also directed at the Asian American Theater Company in San Francisco and at Interact Theater in Philadelphia.

As a Taiko performer, Shiomi began his career in the late 1970s with Katari Taiko in Vancouver, Canada. In the early 1980s, he studied and performed with the San Francisco Taiko Dojo under Grandmaster Seiichi Tanaka. In the 1980s, he also performed with Soh Daiko of New York, the San Jose Taiko Group and Wasabi Daiko of Toronto. He is the founder, artistic director, and lead player of Mu Daiko, the professional taiko ensemble within Mu Performing Arts. Over the past eight years he has trained all members of Mu Daiko, and has taught many others to play. Mu Daiko has played at numerous outreach performances and recently gave its 9th annual concert, TenChi Taiko, at The Southern Theater in December 2005. As an individual taiko performer he played in the Ragamala Music and Dance Theater production of The Return of the Rain Seed and was awarded a MSAB Cultural Collaborations grant to create a taiko and bharatanatyam performance with Ragamala Music and Dance Theater. He has performed with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and the Chamber Music Society of Minnesota. Mr. Shiomi's other activities have included serving on the Minnesota State Arts Board Cultural Pluralism Advisory Committee, as a board director at the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, and on the Ordway Cultural Advisory Committee. He is an Alumni Member of the Playwrights' Center and he has served on numerous panels for the above bodies, for private foundations and on the steering committee for the Asian American Theater Festival planned for 2007. Mr. Shiomi recently received an Award for Leadership and Excellence in the Arts from the State Council of Asian Pacific Minnesotans.