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 Theater and co-founder of bicoastal At Last Theatre, which produced House/HOME last October for the O+ Festival in Kingston, New York. Alan produced and wrote Dominion, Five Honorable Mention Plays in 2016 and Present Tense in 2015. His one-act play Transgress was presented at the 36th Annual William Inge Festival in Kansas, The Bechdel Group in New York City, and The Road Theater Company's Summer Playwrights Festival in North Hollywood - and nominated for two international playwriting awards. This 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 disruption. In November, Alan was a member of the Micro-Galleries Artist Collective and participated in their 2018 residency in Pātan, Nepal.
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 Chris Pratorius-Gómez on Sueños Americanos ( American Dreams) 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 with Christopher Turner on PROGRESS 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 |