BIOGRAPHY
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Alan Olejniczak is a playwright and opera librettist. He’s a member of the Micro Galleries International Collective, Associate Artist with Faultline Theater in San Francisco, and a scriptwriter for Punch Presentations in Hong Kong. Alan's plays have been produced across the country: Transgress, Dominion, and Present Tense (New Play Exchange). Helt Texas, his new play about climate change and contemporary discourse is currently being developed as an on-line theater production with Punch Presentations and will be released in February 2020. Alan is a board member of Opera Parallèle and a current member of the Dramatist Guild and Opera America and former board member of Theatre Bay Area. In September 2019, Alan was chosen as an Artist in Residence for Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park and the first playwright ever selected by the National Parks Arts Foundation. Alan’s other artist residencies include those in Pātan, Nepal; Skagaströnd, Iceland; along with the prestigious The Arctic Circle Residency, sailing the icy waters around The International Territory of Svalbard.
Alan currently has several chamber operas in development. An adaption of Tolstoy's Death of Ivan Ilyich with John Young, will be first presented as a workshop performance with Opera Orlando in May 2020. Their second collaboration is their youth opera based on Hans Christian Andersen's The Nightingale. Also in development is Dreams Americanos, a bilingual opera loosely based on Cyrano de Bergerac with composer, Chris Pratorius-Gómez. Full Playwrighting Resume 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 between San Francisco and The Sea Ranch. "How in the heck do you pronounce that last name?" OH/la/KNEE/check |