Duong Le Quy graduated from the Hanoi Institute of Theatre and Cinema in 1990. He came to Australia in 1994 to learn English and became an Australian citizen in 1999. A graduate from NIDA with a Diploma in Directing, he directs the Vietnamese Arts Cultural Exchange Program, through which he has taken groups of Australian theatre people to Vietnam to present Australian plays in Vietnamese. He worked with the HoChiMinh City Theatre Company exploring the interaction between Vietnamese body language and English text, and produced the play 'A Green Marigold in the Marsh' by Luu Quang Vu.
The first Vietnamese-born playwright to break into mainstream Australian theatre, he has been awarded a number of grants including the 1999 Australia Council Literature Fellowship and a Churchill Fellowship to study traditional theatre in Vietnam (2001).