BIOGRAPHY
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Alan Olejniczak is a San Francisco-based playwright and opera librettist. Alan is on the board of Theatre Bay Area Board, a member of the Dramatist Guild and Opera America. He is an Associate Artist with FaultLine Theaterand co-founder of bicoastal At Last Theatre in Kingston, New York. His works have been developed and produced across the country. His works include: Transgress, Dominion, and Present Tense (available on New Play Exchange). Alan returns to The 38th Annual William Inge Festival in Independence, Kansas to present Val-Kill a his one-act play about Eleanor Roosevelt’s fight to end lynching in the South. Val-Kill will then premiere in June at the FDR Presidential Library & Museum in Hyde Park, New York. Last summer, Alan was on an expeditionary artist residency with The Arctic Circle, sailing the icy waters around Svalbard. There he completed the first draft of HELT TEXAS, a new play about climate change and contempory discourse. It’s currently being developed as an on-line theatre production with Punch Presentations in Hong Kong. Last November, Alan was a member of the Micro-Galleries Artist Collective and participated in their 2018 residency in Pātan, Nepal. There he facilitated a workshop on personal storytelling with The Blue Diamond Society, an LGBTQI advocacy group in Katmandu.
Alan currently has three full-length chamber operas in development. He is working with Daniel Brown on their opera on the French mathematician, Évariste Galois and with John Young on the adaption of Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Alan is also working with composer, Chris Pratorius-Gómez on Sueños Americanos loosely based on Cyrano de Bergerac. Alan has also written for Portico Studios in San Rafael, formally a next level interactive storytelling experiences in virtual reality. He is also collaborating on PROGRESS with Christoper Turner blending fine art narrative photography with social and environmental activism. Alan has come late to dramatic writing. In a past life, he was a wine professional for twelve years, started his career at the City Grill in Atlanta and ending as the Sommelier of the Dining Room of the Ritz Carton - Buckhead, a Mobil Five-Star, AAA Five Diamond restaurant. He then went on to become a Special Educator working for sixteen years with elementary and middle-school students with a focus on reading acquisition. Alan and husband David divide their time between San Francisco and The Sea Ranch, California. "How in the heck do you pronounce that last name?" OH/la/KNEE/check |