Kearen Pang, born on 11 February 1975, is a Hong Kong cross-media artist who writes, directs, performs and teaches. She attended St. Mary's Canossian College and graduated from the School of Drama at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts in 1997. She began as a stage actress before producing a series of theatre works she wrote and directed herself, appearing across stage and media with an independent, thoughtful female persona while also teaching drama and writing; her early one-woman shows, in which she played multiple roles alone, established a strong personal style. In 2005 she created her first solo theatre piece, 29+1, on the anxieties of turning thirty; it was revived several times and toured abroad and remains her signature work. In 2008 her second one-woman show, Goodbye and Goodbye, won her Best Actress (Comedy/Farce) at the Hong Kong Drama Awards. She was named one of the Ten Outstanding Young Persons of Hong Kong in 2014. Her debut feature 29+1, released in 2017 and adapted from her stage play, closed the Hong Kong Asian Film Festival and won her Best Director for a foreign-language drama at the Nice International Film Festival that year. In 2018 she won Best New Director at the 37th Hong Kong Film Awards and the Hong Kong Film Directors' Guild's new-director award for the film. Her second feature, Mama's Affair, written and directed by her and starring Teresa Mo, Keung To and Jer Lau, took close to HK$43 million at the Hong Kong box office in 2022, placing third among the year's top ten Hong Kong films and among the highest-grossing Chinese-language films in local history. She has continued to work as a producer and screenwriter, one of the few Hong Kong women to write and direct in both theatre and cinema.
By moving the anxieties of turning thirty from stage to screen with 29+1, she drew wider attention to women-centred local films, and her practice of writing, directing and performing offers a working model for crossing between theatre and cinema in Hong Kong.
Achievements
- 2005 · Created her first solo theatre piece, 29+1
- 2008 · Won Best Actress (Comedy/Farce) at the Hong Kong Drama Awards for her one-woman show Goodbye and Goodbye
- 2018 · Won Best New Director at the 37th Hong Kong Film Awards for her debut feature 29+1