Catherine Yu is a Chicago-based writer of plays and librettos. Her plays include In Spite of My Ambivalence (2025 Venturous finalist; Synchronicity Theatre; Suzi recommended); Alice Wareham and the Fabulation of Time (2025 Screencraft Stage Play Competition Quarterfinalist); In Love and Friendship (2023 Austin Film Festival Second Round); Le Jeté (2019 BAPF Semifinalist); The Day is Long to End (2018 University of Florida production); and The Sun Experiment (FringeNYC Excellence in Playwriting; Time Out NY’s Top Ten Nightlife and Music Events of the Week in August 2014). Her work has been supported or developed by NYSCA/NYFA, MacDowell, St. Louis Shakespeare Festival, Bramble Theatre Company, Colt Coeur, Soho Rep, New York Theatre Workshop and others. Her one-act “A Sand Romance” was a 2016 Heidman Award finalist. She has served as a grants panelist for NYSCA/NYFA, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and Brooklyn Arts Council.

Catherine is a resident playwright with Chicago Dramatists. Her opera librettos have been commissioned or developed by Atlanta Opera, Strange Trace and New Music Theatre Alliance. Her fiction has been supported by Tin House and an Illinois Arts Council grant and is forthcoming in The Queens Review. She is a 2025-2026 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University and is currently under commission with TImeLine Theatre’s Playwrights Collective in Chicago. BA: Stanford University. MFA: New York University.