KUMIKO UEDA playwright - director

Kumiko Uedaplaywright/director

Born into a farming family in a historic village in Nara, Japan’s ancient capital, Kumiko Ueda is a playwright and director whose work moves across and unsettles the boundaries between tradition and the avant-garde, art and entertainment, and ultimately between performers and audiences.
Her creative drive comes from experiences outside the art world, including growing up in a restrictive rural community and working within the constraints of corporate Japan. The social and physical realities she experienced in these environments continue to give her artistic practice their singular character.

After studying French language and literature at Kyoto University, she worked for a pharmaceutical company before joining the Takarazuka Revue, a Japanese musical theatre company in which all roles are performed by women. She spent more than a decade there writing and directing large-scale theatrical productions. For Hoshi au Hito Yo (A Night When the Stars Align), she received the Best Director Award at the 23rd Yomiuri Theatre Awards.

In 2022, she left the company and began developing a more personal and critically engaged artistic practice. That same year, her play Biome was shortlisted for the Kishida Kunio Drama Award.

From 2023 to 2024, she was based in France as part of a government-supported residency, conducting artistic research within the country’s public theatre system. She now develops her practice between Japan and France. To support her ongoing research and creation, she founded Projectumi in Japan and Compagnie Projectumi in France.

In 2025, she created Banquet for a Void, an immersive banquet performance staged at Kamata Onsen, a public bathhouse in Tokyo.

She has been a Saison Fellow II since 2024.

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projectumï

Projectumi is Kumiko Ueda’s artistic platform, based in Japan and France.
Its mission is to create live performance experiences through which a broad audience can engage with urgent contemporary questions.
The company explores new relationships between performers, audiences, and space. In many of its works, spectators are invited to shift from observers to participants—or even unexpected performers.