Young Jean Lee was born in 1974 in South Korea. Lee and her parents emigrated to America when she was two. Lee grew up in Pullman, Washington state. She became interested in studying Shakespeare when she was first introduced to a few of his plays in  high school. She attended UC Berkeley as an undergraduate English major, focusing her studies heavily on Shakespeare, and then entered UC Berkeley’s English PhD program immediately upon graduation. In her doctoral program, she studied with and assisted some of the best living Shakespeare scholars in the country. Lee’s dissertation topic ended up being Shakespeare’s King Lear. Specifically, she was studying the differences between Shakespeare’s take on the story of Lear and the anonymous play that served as Shakespeare’s source material. 

As she discusses in her own company’s vision, Lee says she always pushes herself to write in territory unfamiliar to her and to challenge her audience’s assumptions. Before writing Lear, Lee had written a piece inspired by her childhood, a satirical look at Asian-American identity, American Christianity and black American identity. When Lear was commissioned by Soho Rep in 2008, Lee’s father was terminally ill. Using Shakespeare’s King Lear as a jumping off point, Lee wrote a play about our contemporary relationship to our own mortality and to grief. 

https://theharvardadvocate.com/content/an-interview-with-young-jean-lee