BIOGRAPHY
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Alan Olejniczak is a San Francisco-based playwright and opera librettist. He is an Associate Artist with FaultLine Theater in San Francisco and a member of the Micro Galleries International Arts Collective for 2019/20. Alan's plays have been produced across the country. His plays include: Transgress, Dominion, Heaven and Earth, and Present Tense (available on New Play Exchange). Alan is currently on the board of Theatre Bay Area Board and a member of the Dramatist Guild and Opera America. Last May, Alan returned to Kansas for The 38th Annual William Inge Festival to present First Lady Roosevelt, a one-act play written for the National Park Service about Eleanor Roosevelt’s fight to end lynching in the South. This September, Alan was chosen as an Artist in Residence in Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park with the National Parks Arts Foundation and in October, Alan will attend the NES Artist Residency in Skagaströnd, Iceland.
Last summer, Alan was on an expeditionary artist residency with The Arctic Circle, sailing the icy waters around The International Territory of 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. Alan was an artist with 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 LGBTQ advocacy group in Katmandu. Alan currently has two full-length chamber operas in development. An adaption of Tolstoy's Death of Ivan Ilyich with John Young being presented as a concert workshop with Opera Orlando in May 2020. And Dreams 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. He and his husband live in San Francisco and The Sea Ranch. "How in the heck do you pronounce that last name?" OH/la/KNEE/check |