Through Purple Tree, I have been developing and producing content for stage, screen and audio mediums and hosting artists’ residencies since 2019. The company is named after the first living thing my son asked me to draw.

He was a toddler then, and asked me to draw a purple tree. I'd spent most of my life thinking of myself as an artist: someone who wrote what she wanted to write. My son's request was earnest and specific. He was commissioning me, with my love for him, to deliver. I handed him his drawing and he traced his fingers over the magic marker lines, satisfied. He was teaching me something I hadn’t yet let myself learn: art needs an audience. Art needs a market. That tree gave the company its name, and its whole philosophy.

I’ve spent my career moving between these two worlds: the world of work made for its own sake, and work made to be watched, staged, sold, and felt by someone else.

I started as an actor, in Chicken Rice War (2000), a film that won the Discovery Award at the Toronto International Film Festival when I was 15. Singapore's national broadcaster wanted to sign me as a young artiste. My mother said no — a decision I only learned about years later — and I went to Yale to study Literature and Theatre instead, writing plays under the tutelage of Sarah Treem, Donald Margulies and Deb Margolin, and staging plays by Joe Orton, Caryl Churchill and Kenneth Lonergan.

While still in college, I translated screenplays for Warner China Film HG. After graduating, I was a broadcast journalist for Hong Kong's Asia Television and a Hong Kong correspondent for Singapore’s leading English Language newspaper The Straits Times. After obtaining an MFA in Dramatic Writing at NYU Tisch on a government scholarship, I wrote for Max, Audible and Netflix in both English and Chinese.

My play Russia was staged at the Yale Playwrights Festival. I remain the only Singaporean playwright the festival has featured. My bilingual play 7 Days in Jing An sold out in Shanghai four years later. My work has shown in Telluride, Glasgow, Moscow, Tokyo, London, and New York, and I've performed improv comedy in English and Chinese with Zmack, Shanghai's oldest troupe. David Henry Hwang called my thesis play Ubin "a lovely, poignant meditation on the nature of love." My feature screenplay A Song and a Dance was a finalist for Orb Media's inaugural China-Hollywood Screenwriting Fellowship.

After attending two deathbeds, I became a certified death coach and death doula in 2023.

I am also a published poet and essayist, a trained vinyasa instructor, and mother to two.