Jo Riley

Who is Jo Riley?

Josephine Riley, usually Jo Riley, is a British writer, translator, theatre actor, and schoolteacher. Dr. Riley has written and translated several books about theatre arts, especially Chinese theatre. She currently teaches film and drama at Munich International School in Germany.

Riley reads, writes, and speaks Mandarin Chinese, and is better known for having in the early 1980s widely traveled in China and learned to act in the Chinese theatre as one of the first foreign students at the Central Academy of Drama in Beijing, eventually writing Chinese Theatre and the Actor in Performance, a reference book that "gives an 'inside' view of Chinese theatre and the actor in performance for the first time [...] from her personal observations of, and dialogue with, Chinese actors and her first-hand experiences of the theatre world of China in general, none of which was possible before 1980." She also made the first English translation of The Other Shore by Nobel Laureate in Literature playwright Gao Xingjian.