Perry Miyake was born and raised in Venice, Calif., a second-generation graduate of Venice High School (S '71), where his main accomplishments were lettering as a first-string lineman for George Rose's Bee football team and getting a three-digit lottery number for the still-active Vietnam-era draft.

     He attended Cal State Long Beach where, while changing majors from political science to psychology to English, he was introduced to Asian American studies and his future wife, worked at the Long Beach Telephone Hotline and took writing classes with Dora Polk and Murray Mednick.

     After getting married at age 21, he dropped out of college, changed jobs a lot and eventually joined East West Players, the nation's oldest Asian Pacific American theater company, where he took acting classes from Dom Magwili and Clyde Kusatsu, singing classes from Glen Chin and studied at Norman Cohens's writers workshop; did tech work with Rae Creevey, running lights for the first long run of Pacific Overtures; had his first produced work, "F.A.P. (First Asian President") from an idea by Mako and other comedy skits including "The Art of Humiliating Survival" in the CBS-sponsored summer show "Made in America" in 1979.

     In 1980, he received the Rockefeller Foundation Playwright-In-Residence Grant from EWP for his first full-length play.  "What the Enemy Looks Like".  He wrote one episode of the PBS children's educational series, "The New Americans", to date his only television credit: and wrote set pieces for the Asian American comedy / improv group Cold Tofu in its early stages, including "Battle of the Network Newscasters" and "Ferdie and Imelda", as well as "Wok with Wu" for Patty Toy at the Olio Theater.

     His second play, "Visitors from Nagasaki", was produced by EWP in August 1984, where it was buried by the Olympics festival.

     He developed his next play, "Interracial Relations", at the LATC Asian Theater Lab under the direction of Dom Magwili and Amy Hill and it was selected for the 1990 Seattle Group Theatre Multicultural Playwrights Festival.

     His last play, "Doughball", was produced by EWP in 1990-91 and was the subject of a chapter of USC Prof. Dorinne Kondo's book, "About Face: Performing Race In Fashion and Theater".

     In 2000, he received the Made in America Award for Playwriting for his body of work with the theater, one of only six awarded in EWP's 38 year history.

     In 2002, one of his old skits, which he does not remember writing, was revived for Cold Tofu's "The Best of Cold Tofu: Celebrating 20 Years of Comedy" show at Los Angeles Theatre Center.

     His first novel, "21st Century Manzanar", was published by Really Great Books in 2002.

     His play, Doughball, has been taught in classes at USC and UCLA and his novel "21st Century Manzanar" is currently being taught in classes at UC Berkeley.