Celine Song

Celine Song (born September 19, 1988, Seoul, South Korea) is a rising star, though her work is done behind the camera. The Canadian filmmaker has found immense success with her directorial debut, Past Lives (2023), which received two Academy Award nominations and five Golden Globe nominations, and her sophomore film, Materialists (2025). Both focus on themes of love, identity, womanhood, and fate.

The first act

Born Song Ha-Young in South Korea, she is the child of two creatives, with her mother being an illustrator and a graphic designer and her father a filmmaker. Growing up in such a household was an experience that she has described as her own “version of having a trust fund,” given that her parents have always been supportive and encouraged her artistic endeavors. Throughout her youth, Song always knew that writing was her destiny—but more on that later.

Her family moved to Toronto when she was 12 years old, marking a significant shift in Song’s understanding of her own selfhood. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times in 2023, she said that her childhood happened “in a different culture under a different name,” going on to call it a “distinctly separated moment in your life that very much feels like a past life.”

Discover the fascinating events that shaped the world, straight from our editors.

SIGN UP

By clicking “Sign Up”, you consent to the Britannica Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.

Song attended Markham District High School (MDHS), a public school in Ontario that educates about 1,400 students annually. She went on to attend Queen’s University, about a two-and-a-half-hour drive east from MDHS.

She originally majored in psychology with a minor in philosophy and saw a future as a clinical psychologist. Yet even this tied back to her love for writing, because, according to a 2025 interview with Queen’s University, understanding the human psyche allowed her to create characters with more depth.

But when she took a German literature course, she fell in love with the work of playwright Bertolt Brecht. From there the stage was set. She would attend every theatrical production, befriending drama students along the way. As her professors nudged her toward pursuing her creative talents, Song also began to write plays to be produced at local theaters.

Song credits her professors with introducing her to various schools of philosophical thought, including existentialism and postmodernism, the latter of which is grounded in interrogating language. Song’s desire to explore the meaning and limits of language, as well as to wring out life’s fundamental questions, are at the center of her films, and Song has been lauded for how her unique storytelling probes these issues.

Explore Britannica Premium!

The trusted destination for professionals, college students, and lifelong learners.

SUBSCRIBE

When her play Sound Utterly Serious went into performance in 2009, it was called an “innovative gem” by her college’s student newspaper. Her body of work grew and, after she graduated from Queen’s University in 2010, took her to a place known for its theater: New York City.

“An endurance game”

Song told the Columbia Spectator that she was truly “made into an artist” at Columbia University, where she received a Master of Fine Arts in playwriting in 2014. It was under the instruction of Columbia’s professors that Song came to terms with the sometimes dissonant expectations she had for herself versus those from other people.

“You can’t write so that you can make somebody else love it,” she said in the interview. “You can only write something in a way that you yourself can love it.”

After graduating, Song sent her plays everywhere that allowed open submissions and continued writing relentlessly. With her dedication came some early success, including a number of regional awards and an entry into a writing development program that made her a rising star in the theater community.

Song’s play Endlings, which foreshadows many of the themes that audiences later see in her blockbuster films, premiered in 2019 at the American Repertory Theater in Massachusetts. The first act of this dark comedy is set on an island in South Korea and follows three elderly women, called haenyeos (“sea women”), who dive into the ocean to gather seafood. The second act of the play takes place in Manhattan, where Korean American playwright Ha Young is working to tell the women’s story.

Endlings, now considered Song’s breakout piece, earned her a spot on short lists for multiple awards and was selected for a prestigious development program for new plays in 2018. The following year she began work on a new script about a pair of childhood friends, which would eventually be called Past Lives.

In the fall of 2020 Song had the opportunity to work with the New York Theatre Workshop to direct the Anton Chekhov play The Seagull. With many theaters closed because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Song was tasked with thinking of a new and engaging way to stage the play—and she did just that.

She chose to adapt the play to be called The Seagull on The Sims 4. The two-night event, which saw Song create, place, and manage all eight characters in the play in the video game The Sims 4 and stream it on Twitch, was heralded as “revolutionary” by Vulture.

After a script Song had written got into the hands of Rafe Judkins, a showrunner for a TV series in development, Song was brought on as a staff writer in 2018 for the show’s first season. A few years later, in the fall of 2021, The Wheel of Time (2021–25) premiered on Amazon Prime Video. The launch was a huge success and became the platform’s most watched premiere that year, with tens of millions of views in the first few days—but nothing quite prepared Song for where things would go.

She called finding her way into the film industry an “endurance game” in a 2024 interview with the Columbia Spectator, noting that “it’s actually about how long you can keep writing.” Song proved her point with her first film. It was announced in 2020 that film and TV studio A24 had picked up the rights to her debut feature, Past Lives, with Song as both the writer and director. When it premiered three years later, Song and her characters showed that she had, at last, won that game.

Past Lives

For fans of the phrase “art imitates life,” Past Lives makes for particularly fitting viewing. This semi-autobiographical film highlights the romance of the mundane and explores the idea of inyeon, a Korean word for a special, predestined connection between two people.

Song was inspired by an experience in a bar with her husband, Justin Kuritzkes, and her childhood sweetheart and best friend visiting from Korea. Song told The Hollywood Reporter that during her experience translating between them, she became “a bridge or a portal between these two parts of my own self.”

In the 2023 movie, this exact situation is played out in a climactic scene between Nora (played by Greta Lee), her American husband (John Magaro), and her childhood friend Hae Sung (Teo Yoo).

Nora’s character, like Song, also emigrated from Seoul to Canada and then to the United States. Through her reunion with Hae Sung and what follows, the film explores ideas of destiny, love, and, as she told the Columbia Spectator, “the way that we hold multitudes even though we are in one place at one time, that we are in this particular life, living this one singular existence, but yet we hold within us many parts of our history, different people, different languages, different worlds.”

Past Lives earned Song and her team Oscar nominations for best original screenplay and best picture in 2024, and she received the Directors Guild of America award for outstanding directorial achievement in a first-time feature film.

Materialists and upcoming projects

Celine Song’s second feature, Materialists (2025), similarly follows a female protagonist, played by Dakota Johnson, trying to decipher her relationship with two men: the “perfect guy” and her ex-boyfriend, a struggling actor, played respectively by Pedro Pascal and Chris Evans.

Another parallel to Past Lives is that Song pulls from her own life once again: Materialists was inspired by Song’s short run as a matchmaker. Even though she stayed in the position for only six months, Song told TODAY.com, she learned more about people during that experience than at any other point in her life.

The film explores the personal development of Lucy, Johnson’s character, as well as the metamorphosis of her understanding of love from a business-and-numbers game to something much less tangible. And even though the plot explores the importance of it, the film has seen material success: Materialists grossed more than $90 million globally a few months after its release.

The buzz around the film coincided with the announcement of Song’s next venture, which will be an esports drama series for HBO called Damage. The project was in development as of September 2025.