Celine Song

Celine Song
Celine Song at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival
Born	Song Ha-Young (1988-09-19) September 19, 1988 (age 36) South Korea
Citizenship	Canada
Education	Queen's University (BA) Columbia University (MFA)
Occupations	Filmmaker playwright
Years active	2017-present
Spouse	Justin Kuritzkes ​ (m. 2016)​
Korean name
Hangul	송하영
RR	Song Hayeong
MR	Song Hayŏng

Celine Song (born Song Ha-Young; Korean: 송하영;^[1] born September 19, 1988) is a Canadian director, playwright, and screenwriter based in New York City. Among her plays are Endlings and The Seagull on The Sims 4 (both 2020). Her directorial film debut, Past Lives (2023), received critical acclaim and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay. Her second film, Materialists, was released in theaters on June 13, 2025.

Song was born in South Korea.^[2] Her parents, both artists, moved the family to Markham, Ontario, Canada when she was 12.^[2][3] Her father, Song Neung-han,^[4] is a filmmaker.^[5] Her mother is an illustrator and graphic designer.^[6] She has hinted that her Western name is a reference to Jacques Rivette's 1974 film Céline and Julie Go Boating.^[7]

Song wrote her first play, an adaptation of Prometheus, at a classics conference she attended (the Ontario Student Classics Conference) with the Markham District Classics Club.^[8]

Song received her undergraduate degree from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, where she studied psychology with a minor in philosophy. She received her MFA in playwriting from Columbia University in 2014.^[9][10][8]

Song's play Endlings premiered in 2019 at the American Repertory Theater. The show's off-Broadway run opened in March 2020 at New York Theatre Workshop, but was cut short due to the COVID-19 pandemic.^[2] The show tells the story of three older Korean women haenyeos and a Korean-Canadian writer living in New York.^[11][2] In a mixed review, Alexandra Schwartz of The New Yorker called Endlings "two works spliced roughly together: a traditional play that seeks to depict people’s lives, and a metafictional examination of the playwright’s own motivations, which flirts with honesty before traipsing down a solipsistic path of no return."^[12] The play was chosen for the 2018 O'Neill Playwrights Conference and was a finalist for the 2020 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize.^[13]

In November 2020, Song directed a live production of Chekhov's The Seagull using The Sims 4 on Twitch for New York Theatre Workshop, called The Seagull on The Sims 4.^[14][2] In a review for Vulture, Helen Shaw praised the play: "I think Song’s game-play/play-game managed the trick by capturing the experience not of going to a show but of working on one. At her urging, viewers brought the quality of attention that comes with collaboration, and that felt like a churning motor under everything, trying to propel the show into being."^[15]

Song's other plays include Tom and Eliza, which was named a semifinalist for the American Playwriting Foundation's 2016 Relentless Award, Family, and The Feast.^[16][13] According to her biography on The Playwright's Realm, "she has been awarded residences, fellowships, and commissions from MTC/Sloan, Sundance, the Millay Colony for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the Edward F. Albee Foundation."^[13]

Song wrote the screenplay for Past Lives, her directorial film debut, about two childhood friends who reunite as adults (portrayed by Greta Lee and Teo Yoo).^[17] The film is partly inspired by Song's life, specifically a dinner she had with her English-speaking husband and a Korean-speaking friend visiting New York.^[8] She said that "at one point, I realized that I wasn't just translating between their languages and cultures, but also translating between these two parts of myself as well."^[8] The film was produced by A24 and premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2023.^[18]

Past Lives received critical acclaim and has been compared to the work of Richard Linklater, Woody Allen, and Noah Baumbach.^[19][20] The Guardian's Benjamin Lee wrote that "as writer, Song manages to keep her dialogue believably light-footed and spare while as director, she confidently and evocatively captures both cities with a breadth that belies her inexperience".^[21] Richard Lawson of Vanity Fair called the film "understated and yet vast in its consideration of the slow changes of life, of the past ever whispering to the present. The film is as auspicious a debut as one can hope to see at Sundance, the announcement of a filmmaker confident in her craft and generous with her heart."^[18] The film received many accolades, including nominations for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay at the 96th Academy Awards.^[22] Song was the first Asian woman to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, and the first Asian woman director to be nominated in both the Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay categories.^[23][24]

Song's first television screenwriting job was as a staff writer for the first season of Amazon's The Wheel of Time in 2021.^[25] In April 2024, the music video for pop artist Laufey's song "Goddess" was released, directed by Song.^[26] Her next film project with A24, Materialists, starring Dakota Johnson, Pedro Pascal, and Chris Evans,^[27][28][29] was released in theaters on June 13, 2025.^[30]

Song resides in New York City with her husband, writer Justin Kuritzkes, whom she met at an artist residency hosted by the Edward F. Albee Foundation.^[31][32][8] Song has said he is always the first person to read her scripts.^[33]

Television

Film

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