AJ Layague (she/her/hers) is an award-winning Filipino American composer/playwright with degrees from Stanford University (BA), CalArts (MFA), and UC San Diego (PhD). She studied playwriting at the David Henry Hwang Writers Institute at East West Players in Los Angeles. She was a 2023 Puffin Foundation Artist, a four-time semi-finalist for the Eugene O’Neill Music Theater Conference, and premiered new work (in rhyming verse) at the 2025 Red Bull Theater Short New Play Festival and the 2023 PanAsian NuWorks Festival in NYC. Her play Cowgirl Katarungan’s Recipe for Adobo received a 2022 Finalist Prize in the FMM Fellowship for Works in Heightened Language Competition at Synecdoche Works as well as a 2023 Larking House Theatre workshop and reading, and was a finalist for the 2024 Judith Royce Award for Excellence in Playwriting, and a semi-finalist for the 2023 O’Neill National Playwrights Conference. It will be presented at Curtis Theatre in Brea, CA in May 2026. She has also been part of the writers cohorts at Circle X Theatre (Los Angeles) and Ensemble Studio Theatre LA. Her single-author musical Lucy Larcom won the 2024 Parlando New Musical Project and had a staged reading in Boulder in 2024.
