Current Ministry Location: Maryknoll Sisters Center-Maryknoll, NY
Sister/Doctor Joanna Chan was born and raised in Guangzhou (Canton), China. A graduate of Tack Ching Girls’ Secondary School in Hong Kong and of Chung Chi College, Chinese University, majoring in mathematics, she taught at Maryknoll Convent School in Kowloontong, Hong Kong, after further training at Norhtcote Teachers’ College, before she entered the Maryknoll Sisters’ Congregation in the Philippines.
After taking her vows, Sister Joanna was assigned to the Church Of Transfiguration in Chinatown, New York City, in late 1969, where she has been serving since. At the same time, she also worked to put herself through school at Teachers College, Columbia University, majoring in theatre, receiving her M.A. (1971), M.Ed. (1974) and Ed.D. in 1977. Right after, she was invited by Cardinal John Baptist Wu to return to Hong Kong to create an audio-visual center for the Diocese. In 1994, she was awarded the Distinguished Alumni Award by Columbia University’s Teachers College, becoming the first Hong Kong Chinese to receive this honor in the College’s over 100-year history. In June last year, all the documents and records of her 50 years of career in theater, fine arts, social, religious and immigrant services were collected by a Columbia University library for permanent preservation and public display.
In 2016, the Museum of the City of New York opened a permanent exhibition entitled “New York at its Core” to chronicle the city’s 400-year history. Sister Joanna was selected as one of 75 prominent citizens in New York City’s history, among whom was one of the US’s founding fathers, Alexander Hamilton, David Rockefeller, J P Morgan, Fiorello LaGuardia, Donna Karen, Jay Z and Dorothy Day. The exhibit includes digital display that describes Sister Joanna’s life as an artist, community pioneer, and spiritual leader.
As early as 1993, Sister Joanna was an honoree at An All-Star Salute to Chinese-American Cultural Pioneers, among them I. M. Pei and Yo Yo Ma, at City Hall, New York City, with July 9, 1993, named Joanna Chan Day in the City of New York, a city that honored her again in 2013 for her decades of outstanding services to the community through the arts. At the end of 2017, she received the Outstanding Achievement Award from the OCA-WHV Asian Pacific Americans Advocate with November 11 that year designated as “Dr. Joanna Chan’s Day” by the New York State Senate.
A playwright and stage director in North America, Hong Kong, Taiwan and China for over 4 decades, Sister Joanna had written, adapted and directed over 70 stage productions. Co-founder/Artistic Director (1970-77; 83-92) of the Four Seas Players in New York City, she was also Artistic Director of Hong Kong Repertory Theatre in the 1980s, and Co-founder/Artistic Director (1992-2014) of Yangtze Repertory Theatre of America in New York City. During her tenure at Hong Kong Repertory Theatre, she encouraged and promoted works by local playwrights, with her own Crown Ourselves with Roses restaged three times on the local stage besides going overseas in 1989 as the only original work from Hong Kong to date, that toured North America. The play was hailed by The Asian Wall Street Journal as “a tour de force of our times”.
Much of Chan’s plays dramatize the forces of Chinese history. Under the guise of ancient stories, she explores what she cares deeply about: personal integrity, forgiveness, reconciliation, the preciousness of every single life, the importance of the rule of law, the need to honor human rights…
Productions written, adapted and directed by Sister Joanna include Shakespeare’s Othello; Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex; Wilder’s The Match Maker as an opening event of the Hong Kong Cultural Centre in 1989; the musicals The King and I, and Cabaret for the 1988 Hong Kong Arts Festival; the Chinese literary masterpiece, Dream of the Red Chamber, for the 1987 Hong Kong Arts Festival; Raymond To’s Where Love Abides which she directed and took to China in 1987; as well as her own plays reflecting the relationship between Hong Kong and China in view of 1997: Before the Dawn-wind Rises, commissioned by the Hong Kong Urban Council for the 10th Asian Arts Festival; and Crown Ourselves with Roses, commissioned by Sing Tao Newspapers, which toured North America in 1989. The play was included in An Anthology of Modern Chinese Theater as one of 22 most significant works in Chinese theater in 100 years, published by Columbia University Press (2010). An English version of Before the Dawn-Wind Rises has been included in An Oxford Anthology of Chinese Contemporary Drama (1997). Her OneFamilyOneChildOneDoor, a black comedy on the human cost of China’s one-child policy, premiered in 2001, and revived in 2002 and 2003, was named one of two finalists in the Jane Chambers Playwriting Contest.
In 2010, Chan was again commissioned by Hong Kong Repertory Theatre to create a new work, Empress of China, on the first encounter of the Chinese and American people. It received its world premiere in 2011, followed by a Yangtze production later that year. Early in 2014, she directed for the Hong Kong company her 1992 work, The Soongs: By Dreams Betrayed, that opened in January 2014, at the Grand Theatre at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre. Her latest play was another Hong Kong Repertory Theatre commission, Dai Lo and Dai Lo: The lives and Times of Ho Tung and Chou Shouson, two towering figures in Hong Kong. By late 2019, her multilingual plays had been published in 8 volumes by MI Design in Hong Kong.
At Maryknoll, Sister Joanna was Coordinator of China History Project from 1980 till 1986. In 1992, she helped create the Heritage Exhibition and remain its Director till today.
A member of the Dramatists Guild of America, Sister Joanna was a columnist for Hong Kong’s New Evening Post from 1986 to 1997. She began working in Sing Sing maximum security prison in upstate New York in 2002 in the theatre, Catholic and Chinese Language programs, directing the inmates in August Wilson’s Jitney in 2003; and in November 2006, in the critically acclaimed production of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, that was hailed as a work that gave the play ‘one of its finest hours 2,500 years later’ (Michael Millius). In 2012, Sister Joanna was instrumental in helping to free an innocent man jailed for nearly 18 years. The story was told in a full-time episode at NBS’s Dateline special.
An accomplished painter and designer, Sister Joanna’s art works (oils, water colors and computer designs), many of which were based on her extensive journeys through the Middle East, the Soviet Union, Northern Africa, Europe and China, had been presented in solo and group exhibitions in upstate and downtown New York and in Hong Kong. The album of the full collection had been published by MI Design in 2022.
Since 2010, Sister Joanna Chan has been leading retreats and spiritual talks for Christians in Hong Kong, North America, and mainland China, both online and in person.