Sook-Yin Lee

Biography

Sook-Yin Lee is a Canadian broadcaster, musician, film director, actress and multimedia artist. She is a former MuchMusic VJ and a former radio host on CBC Radio. She has appeared in films, notably in the John Cameron Mitchell movie Shortbus.

Early and personal life

Lee was born in Vancouver, British Columbia. She is the second daughter of father, Leo Lee, from Hong Kong and a mother from Mainland China, Lee was raised as a devout Roman Catholic. Her father was a post-World War II orphan from Hong Kong, and her mother an escapee from Communist China who remained in and out of psychiatric institutions when Lee was young. Lee also has a sister, Deanna, a Vancouver-based artist. She grew up within a strict, secretive and unstable family. When Lee was 15, her parents split up and Lee ran away from home, for a time living on the street before eventually living with a "community of lesbians and artists".
In the mid-1980s, she became the lead singer for Bob's Your Uncle, a Vancouver alternative rock band. Lee often incorporated performance art techniques into the band's melodic rock. When that band broke up, Lee pursued a solo music career, releasing several solo albums and performing as an actor in theatre, film and television projects. She was the lead singer for the band Slan. Neko Case covered Lee's song "Knock Loud" on her 2001 EP Canadian Amp.
She had a relationship with the comic artist Chester Brown from 1992 until 1996. She is depicted in several of his comics. He moved to Vancouver for two years to be with her, and moved back to Toronto with her when she became a VJ for MuchMusic. He also drew the cover for her 1996 solo album Wigs 'n Guns. Brown's relationship with Lee is the last boyfriend/girlfriend relationship he had, as he explains in Paying for It. They remain good friends, and Brown has contributed artwork to her productions as recently as 2009's Year of the Carnivore; in 2024, Lee directed the film adaptation of Brown's graphic novel Paying for It.
She was later in a relationship with writer and musician Adam Litovitz, who was also her frequent artistic collaborator, from 2007 until 2018. They occasionally performed improvised musical sets under the name LLVK, short for Lee/Litovitz/Valdivia/Kamino, and formed the band Jooj, which released its debut album in 2015. An album of music written by Sook-Yin and Adam was completed in 2020 and was released under the title of jooj two in April 2021 on Mint Records.
In March 2026, Lee announced a new album, 72RHR×72RHR29 May 2026 · Studio albumSpotify (search)YouTube Music (search)Tracklist · 10 tracks1Mending Wall2A Hollow3Digital Fire4Green Tara5Resting Heart6Locked Boy4:257Monkey Mind8Unlock the Pain9Travelogue without Moving10I Want to Tell You; it was released via Hand Drawn Dracula on May 29, 2026.
She resides in Toronto.
Lee is bisexual and gender-fluid.

Broadcasting

Lee became a VJ for MuchMusic in 1995, hosting MuchMusic's alternative music show The Wedge.
In 1995, on the day that sexual orientation was held to be protected under section 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms by the Supreme Court of Canada in the Egan v Canada case, Lee celebrated the decision by kissing a woman on the air. She later appeared on the cover of Xtra! in 1997.
During her last appearance as a MuchMusic VJ in 2001, Lee and her co-host turned their backs to the camera, and mooned the audience on live television.
She became the new host of CBC Radio One's Saturday afternoon pop culture magazine radio-show Definitely Not the Opera in 2002. Definitely Not the Opera completed its run in 2016.
In the fall of 2004, she hosted a documentary celebrating Terry Fox as part of the CBC Television series The Greatest Canadian.
During the Summer of 2008, Lee was a member of the CBC Olympic broadcasting team for the Beijing games. During the games, Lee filmed a TV spot that touched upon concerns regarding human rights and political issues.
In 2016, Lee hosted the 10 episode summer series Sleepover for CBC Radio, which continued as a podcast until 2018.
In 2020, Lee hosted Landscape Artist of the Year Canada, a Canadian adaptation of Landscape Artist of the Year, for Makeful.

Film work

As a feminist, Lee specifically works on films that discuss feminist and/or racial issues. Escapades of One Particular Mr. Noodle (1990) was her debut as a feminist film director. This film was produced by Studio D, a primarily feminist film production company, as one of the short films in their segment Five Feminist Minutes (1990).
Lee played the lead character Alessa Woo, alongside fellow Canadian actor Adam Beach, in Helen Lee's 2001 film The Art of Woo.
Lee also has a smaller part in John Cameron Mitchell's film Hedwig and the Angry Inch, playing Kwahng-Yi, a guitarist in Hedwig's rock band made up of Korean-born army wives.
In 2003, she became the centre of controversy when Mitchell first announced that he was casting Lee in his film Shortbus (released 2006). Due to Mitchell's announcement that the film was to be sexually explicit in nature – Lee and other cast members perform non-simulated intercourse and masturbation on screen – the CBC initially threatened to fire her. In making Shortbus, Mitchell sought to make a film about love and sex without censoring itself. Celebrities such as director Francis Ford Coppola, R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe, actress Julianne Moore and artist and musician Yoko Ono, as well as the CBC's listening audience, rallied behind her, and the CBC ultimately relented. The movie premiered at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. Her performance in Shortbus earned Lee the 2007 International Cinephile Society Award for Best Supporting Actress.
This was not her first film that explores a sexually explicit nature. She acted in 3 Needles (2005), a short film about HIV and AIDS. The film takes place in various locations around the world - Canada, China, and South Africa - demonstrating the universality of STDs/STIs.
In 2012, she was chosen to play Olivia Chow in the biopic television film Jack, alongside Rick Roberts as Jack Layton. The film aired on CBC Television in 2013. She subsequently won the 2014 Canadian Screen Award for Best Performance by a Lead Dramatic Actress in a Program/Mini-Series.
Lee stars in, wrote and directed The Brazilian segment of the 2008 film Toronto Stories.
Her feature film directorial debut Year of the Carnivore premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2009. Lee, Litovitz and Buck 65 also collaborated on the film's soundtrack, which garnered a Genie Award nomination for Best Original Score at the 31st Genie Awards.
Her second feature film as a director, Octavio Is Dead!, premiered at the Inside Out Film and Video Festival in 2018, and received several Canadian Screen Award nominations at the 7th Canadian Screen Awards.

Theatrical work

In 2013, Lee wrote and starred in a theatrical performance show How Can I Forget? at Toronto's Rhubarb and Summerworks theatre festivals. She and Litovitz also staged Morrice Fled: Two Paintings Talk to Each Other, a pop-up performance at the Art Gallery of Ontario based on the art of James Wilson Morrice, in January.
In 2014, Lee choreographed a dance solo for Syreeta Hector as part of On Display for Toronto Dance Theatre. From 2015 to 2017, she created and directed Sphere of Banished Suffering with dancers Jenn Goodwin, Mairi Greig, and Charlie McGettigan with Litovitz developed in residencies with LUFF art+dialogue, Dancemakers, Artscape Sandbox, and premiered at the Festival of New Dance 2017.
In 2019, she wrote and appeared in Unsafe, a documentary theatre production on the topic of censorship, at Canadian Stage.