Meet Wisteria Deng | Nonprofit Bilingual Theater Founder & Clinical Psychologist

We had the good fortune of connecting with Wisteria Deng and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Wisteria, what do you want your legacy to be?
Connection. I think it is perhaps the most beautiful and loaded word, and the single word I wish people can remember me – can remember Vermilion Theater by. Vermilion is about bridging people across languages and cultural backgrounds. It embraces the inevitable “disconnect” every diaspora or even every modern citizen experiences in their own way. Yes, we are all different. We are coexisting with each other with massive past beneath our life that no one has access to. But in theater, performing art and creative storytelling, we are safe to speak or to listen. We are at once less visible and allowed to be more vulnerable. My wish is that, decades later, when someone, even just one person, looks back and remembers Vermilion or myself, they would think of the quiet theater before an actor speaks their first line, or the darkness after a rehearsal. In that magical space, everyone shares part of themselves with each other. In that space, we are all connected.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
Tough one to answer! I see my two parallel careers as equally central to me. My creative role is the founder and assoc. artistic director of a bilingual non-profit theater company – Vermilion Theater. We are the only group producing plays in both Mandarin Chinese and English, also hosting bilingual workshops that facilitate creative healing through storytelling. In my other life, I work as a therapist providing care for sexual and gender minority youth and young adults in Connecticut and New York. Holding the two in both hands hasn’t been easy, but my life as a therapist does fuel my creative career by providing evidence-based practices. It is a luxury to experience both worlds, and I appreciate getting to know amazing people across areas, seeing how they manage the many facets of their life at the same time.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
realizing that you are based in LA and I’m writing from NYC, I’ll answer an NYC version of this question:) I love Brooklyn with my whole heart. Both Williamsburg in Brooklyn and east village/soho has lovely vintage shops, second-hand bookstores and authentic Matcha places. My personal favorite is Setsugekka (a tea shop), codex (second-hand bookstore) and King’s street coffee (lovely cafe filled with plants and sunshine).

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
I want to dedicate my shoutout to Yuning Su. He expanded my theater life to a tremendous degree. When we first met, he was directing an all-male play and I (a woman) decided to audition for a role nonetheless. That was the first time he saw the potential in doing something no one else has tried before and expanding the boundary of theater. Since then, he has done that many times more – re-defining theater and performing art with his daring creativity. Among those many iterations, one of them was how he saw the potential in Vermilion Theater when it was still a student organization based at Yale. Together, we founded the non-profit organization Vermilion Theater INC and toured along the east coast. It is not an overstatement to say that he makes Vermilion possible. He is the reason I am still in theater.

Website: https://vermiliontheater.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vermilion_theater

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wisteria-deng-1b2377152/