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 also an Associate Artist with FaultLine Theater in San Francisco and co-founder of bicoastal At Last Theatre in Kingston, New York. His works have been developed and produced across the country. Alan's plays include: Transgress, Dominion, and Present Tense (available on New Play Exchange). Alan returns to Kansas for The 38th Annual William Inge Festival to present Val-Kill, his one-act play about Eleanor Roosevelt’s fight to end lynching in the South. It will then premiere 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 contemporary 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 residency in Pātan, Nepal. There he facilitated a workshop on personal storytelling with The Blue Diamond Society, an LGBTQ advocacy group in Katmandu.
Alan currently has two full-length chamber operas in development. An adaption of Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich with John Young and Sueños Americanos, a bilingual opera loosely based on Cyrano de Bergerac with composer, Chris Pratorius-Gómez. Alan came late to dramatic writing. In past lives, 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. "How in the heck do you pronounce that last name?" OH/la/KNEE/check |