A 2024 MAP Fund grantee and a four-time semi-finalist for the Eugene O’Neill Music Theater Conference, AJ Layague (she/her/hers) is a Filipino-American composer, playwright, and poet with degrees in music from Stanford University, CalArts, UC San Diego, and a postdoctoral fellowship in Asian Studies/Theater & Music (Occidental College). She also studied playwriting at the David Henry Hwang Writers Institute at East West Players in Los Angeles.

Her collaborative music theater work, A Good Boy, based on interviews with the families of death row prisoners, was a semi-finalist in the Eugene O’Neill 2021 and 2022 Music Theater Conference, and received a Critical Issues Grant from the Humanities for the Public Good and the Cultural Arts Award from the Triangle Community Foundation.

She won a 2022 Finalist Prize from Synecdoche Works' Frank Moffett Mosier Fellowship for Works in Heightened Language for her full-length play, Cowgirl Katarungan’s Recipe for Adobo, which also won a spot in The Larking House Theatre Company’s Playwright’s Intensive Workshop (October 2023). She is also a Puffin Foundation Artist (2023) and was a finalist for Musical Theatre Factory’s Makers cohort (2023) and the Dramatists Guild Foundation Musical Theater Fellowship (2023-2024).

Her multi-media works have been performed in Europe, Asia, and the U.S. at the Pan Asian Rep’s NuWorks Festival (2023), NYU Tisch, Montalvo Arts, and Agosto Foundation in Prague, among others, and she has published and presented on race and theater casting, Chinese film music, and Asian-American hip hop. She was a guest lecturer at Simon Fraser University, USC, National Taiwan University, and Freie Universität Berlin, and has given musical writing workshops for BFA and MFA students at multiple institutions including UC Irvine, CalArts, and Cornish College of the Arts.