Joanne Deng is a Taiwanese writer, actor, playwright and director. Her works shed light on the female experience, focusing on the identity, emotional narrative and vulnerability of the urbanite. In 2015, Deng created “Novel on Stage,” a regular performance reading, often held at atypical venues, of her short stories after publishing. She specializes in the use of theatre elements, mostly monologues, to re-establish the relationship between the text and the reader’s gaze, and to explore the limitations and possibilities of narrative in both literature and theatre. Her most recent focus is on “the truth and fiction of a novel,” where she poses the question, “How important is a true story to the reader?”