Tom Zhang

Tom Zhang is an actor and theater-maker who creates performances that use humor to explore race relations and Asian American identity. As a deviser and playwright, they focus on telling stories typically left out of mainstream entertainment, which often means telling jokes about their parents and growing up in Florida. Tom has great comedic timing, which you can tell because they graduated from CalArts with their Master of Fine Arts in Acting in the middle of a pandemic.

Tom is coming to KU from Duke University, where they were the 2023-2024 Artist-in-Residence. As part of the residency, they taught acting and developed a devised project, DEI: Discovering Everyone's Issues, an immersive DEI workshow that blended real DEI exercises and discussions with heightened theatrical performance to look at how well-meaning spaces fall apart due to infighting and a lack of institutional support. From 2021 to 2023, Tom taught acting, improv, and devising at Emory as an instructor and the inaugural Emory Arts Theater Fellow.

Tom is one-third of You Should Feel Bad, a performance collective specializing in creating politically driven tragicomedies in a style they refer to as "Theater of the Depressed". You Should Feel Bad's first play, How the Grinch Reversed Racism, clashes a reading of Jim Carey's Grinch as accidental racial allegory against an interpretation of him as an eco-terrorist to examine how conversations about race fall apart when entered in bad faith. It premiered at Atlanta Fringe in 2022 and toured at Asheville Fringe and Indy Fringe in 2023. Their second show, Meowderous Intent, fuses murder mystery, Dora the Explorer, and Nature documentaries to critique the human tendency to anthropomorphize animals and had its first run at Asheville Fringe 2024. You Should Feel Bad is also working on Expiration Date, a play about IPV explored through a relationship extended post-breakup using a gifted book of "date coupons". Tom also created a sketch show about Asian American stereotypes called Witness the Yellow Peril which ran at Son of Semele in January 2020. How any of these shows start as comedies is a fantastic question.

Outside of making confusing theatre and teaching, Tom also spends time playing great games, reading great books, and eating great food. Feel free to send them recommendations for any of the above!