Susan Lieu - Meet the creator of 140 LBS: How Beauty Killed My Mother
Photo Credit: Brett Love
Susan Lieu is a Vietnamese-American activist playwright and performer who tells stories that refuse to be forgotten. With a vision for individual and community healing—made possible through the interplay of comedy and drama—her work delves deeply into the lived realities of body insecurity, grieving, and trauma.
Her first theatrical solo show, “140 LBS: HOW BEAUTY KILLED MY MOTHER” it is the unfortunate true story of how Susan’s mother died from plastic surgery malpractice when Susan was 11 years old and her search to find the man responsible for her mother’s death. The World Premiere was held in Seattle February 2019 with a sold-out run, and she later had sold-out premieres in San Francisco, Boston, Los Angeles, and Orange County. Susan self-produced a nearly sold-out 10-city National Tour from October 2019-February 2020 with accolades from NBC News, Los Angeles Times, NPR, The Washington Post (The Lily), American Theatre, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Seattle Times. Lieu held a sold-out World Premiere of the sequel “OVER 140 LBS” in February 2020 at ACT Theatre in Seattle, headlining their inaugural Solo Fest series.
Her work has been showcased with The Wing Luke Museum, The Moth at Benaroya Hall, On the Boards, RISK!, Bumbershoot, and The World Economic Forum. In addition, Lieu collaborated with The Seattle Public Library and Book-It Theatre to adapt and play the main character of The Best We Could Do, a graphic novel on the Vietnamese refugee experience by Thi Bui, as part of the city-wide Seattle Reads program.
Susan began performing comedy in 2011, at venues including the Purple Onion, Carolines on Broadway and Jet City Improv. She has been the Artist-in-Residence at The Collective in Seattle and The Dent Conference. She is an alumna of the World Economic Forum Global Shapers Program and Coro Fellowship in Public Affairs. With a BA from Harvard and an MBA from Yale, Lieu is the co-founder of Socola Chocolatier, an artisanal chocolate company in San Francisco. In her free time, Susan is an active board member of Asylum Access, an international NGO focused on making human rights a reality for refugees through legal empowerment, policy reform and global systems change. She is also an activist for Consumer Watchdog, focused on passing a law to raise medical malpractice caps in California in 2020.