Biographical Note
Jeanne Sakata was born in Watsonville, California on April 8, 1954 and raised in a Japanese American farming family in the Pajaro Valley. She holds a Bachelor's of Art in English Literature from the University of California, Los Angeles. Sakata has been a professional actress since the early 1980's and has performed across the country. She makes her home in Los Angeles, California with her husband.
Sakata made her playwriting debut with Dawn's Light: The Journey of Gordon Hirabayashi, and it premiered in 2007 at East West Players in Los Angeles, California. The play was an interpretation of events that led Gordon Hirabayashi, a Japanese American college student at the University of Washington, to defy Executive Order 9066. In 1942, the United States government imposed a curfew and evacuation order for all Japanese on the west coast under Executive Order 9066. Hirabayashi felt this violated his constitutional rights and defied the orders.
After the Japanese were removed from Seattle, Washington, Hirabayashi turned himself into the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). He was tried and convicted in the Federal District Court of Seattle. In 1943, in the case of Hirabayashi v. United States, the Supreme Court upheld the conviction that the curfew was constitutional and Hirabayashi was sentenced to serve three months in a prison in Arizona. After the war, Hirabayashi became a sociologist and taught at American University in Beirut, American University in Cairo, and the University of Alberta. In the 1980's, Peter Irons and Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga discovered evidence that had been withheld from the Office of Naval Intelligence. In 1986 and 1987, Hirabayashi's original exclusion and curfew convictions were overturned. On January 2, 2012, he died in Edmonton, Alberta. On May 29, 2012, President Barack Obama posthumously awarded Hirabayashi the Medal of Freedom.
Dawn's Light: The Journey of Gordon Hirabayashi was invited by the New York Theatre Workshop to be showcased at their 2009 Dartmouth Residency. The play has also been performed at Chicago's Pritzker Pavilion as part of the 2011 In the Works New Plays Series; in Epic Theatre Ensemble's 2010 Passion Play Festival with the John Jay College of Criminal Justice; at the University of California at Riverside; at the 16th Annual Conference of the Japan Studies Association in Honolulu; and at the Japanese American Citizens League Day of Remembrance events in Sacramento and Salinas, California. At the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, it was the inspiration and theatrical centerpiece of the civil rights symposium Civil Liberties, National Security and the Legacies of the Japanese Removal and Incarceration. With the East West Players Theatre for Youth program, Sakata's play has twice toured high schools and junior high schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District in 2008 and 2010. In 2012, Epic Theatre Ensemble produced Sakata's re-titled play Hold These Truths into a one-character play that was staged off-Broadway.
As a professional actor, Sakata has performed in various plays including Calligraphy by Velina Hasu Houston at L.A. Theater Center, A Cage of Fireflies at the Sundance Institute Theatre Lab in New York, Seven at the University of Southern California, Julia Cho's The Language of Archive at East West Players, and in Red Flamboyant at the Ojai Playwrights Festival in Ojai, California. With Antaeus Company in Los Angeles, she played the title role in George Bernard Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession in the 2012 Classics Fest.
Sakata received the LA Ovation Award Winner for Best Lead Actress for her cross-gender portrayal of Master Hua in Chay Yew's Red at East West Players in Los Angeles, California. She also received a StageScene "Best of 2007" Outstanding Performance mention for her performance as Maria Callas in East West Players Master Class, an Entertainment Today Award for Best Supporting Actress in Chay Yew's A Winter People at Theatre @ Boston Court, and a DramaLogue Award for her work in Jean Genet's The Maids at East West Players. In 2011, Sakata was honored with an Outstanding Artist Award for her career achievements by Los Angeles' Asian Pacific American Friends of the Theatre.