Diana Oh

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Diana Oh, born Yea Bin Oh on September 29, 1986, in Los Angeles, was an American playwright, actor, singer-songwriter, and musician. She also went by Zaza and identified as genderfluid, using they/them pronouns. Oh died by suicide on June 17, 2025, in Brooklyn, New York, at age 38.

She grew up in California, attended Beverly Hills High School, and studied theater at Smith College (BA, 2008) and then earned an MFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2010.

Oh acted in various productions, including Frankenstein Upstairs (2013 off-off-Broadway) and the American premiere of Lucy Kirkwood’s Chimerica (2015) in Washington, D.C. She appeared in the 2016 film How to Be Single and performed in other works like A 24-Decade History of Popular Music and Hansol Jung’s Among the Dead.

From 2014 to 2017, Oh created My Lingerie Play, a series of 10 art/performance installations in New York and Washington, D.C., and online. In these performances, Oh stood on a soapbox in underwear, invited the audience to write on brown paper bags, and encouraged participation. The shows explored topics such as slut-shaming and violence against women. The final installation in 2017 was a concert-style performance at the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, described by The New York Times as more like an indie band concert.

In 2018–2019, Oh started a new project called Clairvoyance, a residency that included audience-participation activities and planting trees at Harvard University. She also acted in web series and plays, joined The Public Theater’s Emerging Writer’s Group, and worked on My H8 Letter to the Gr8 American Theatre. In 2020, she helped bring that work back for a Ma-Yi Theater Company Zoom performance.

Oh’s other notable works include The Infinite Love Party, an all-night event with music and activities. In 2022, she received the Helen Merrill Award for Playwriting from The New York Community Trust. In 2024, Oh wrote and directed A Rare Bird for the Breaking the Binary Theatre Festival. In 2023, she and Lloyd Suh were commissioned by Ma-Yi Theater Company to write The Science Fair Project, a musical that was still in progress when she died.

Oh described herself as a witch and used they/them pronouns. She lived with bipolar disorder.