Joel Tan

Joel Tan is a Singapore playwright and performer based in London, where he is pursuing the Masters in Dramatic Writing at Drama Centre London, Central St. Martins. Recent productions of his plays include Tango (Pangdemonium, 2017), Cafe (The Twenty-Something Theatre Festival, 2016), Mosaic (The M1 Fringe Festival, 2015), and The Way We Go (Checkpoint Theatre, 2014). His plays have received acclaim for their range and complex insight on contemporary Singapore, and several are collected in Joel Tan: Plays Volume 1, published by Checkpoint Theatre, where he is an Associate Artist.

He also creates performances with artists working in contemporary art, poetry, and dance. This most notably includes The Nature Museum (Singapore International Festival of the Arts, 2017), a museological performance tour created with visual artist Robert Zhao; and spoken word memoir You Are Here (2016), created with poet Pooja Nansi. In the UK, Joel also devised and performed in Hooking Up, a series of ethnographic performance lectures at the University of Nottingham. His non-fiction and critical essays have been published by Art Review Asia, POSKOD Singapore, Esquire Singapore, and The Substation Singapore.