BIOGRAPHY
I am open to collaborating with composers and producers for new operas, oratorios, plays, audiodramas, and adaptions of older operatic works.
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Alan Olejniczak is an opera librettist and playwright based in San Francisco. His operas include Atlas of Remote Islands (2023) and Unbound (2021), with music by Nathan Hall; Death of Ivan Ilych (2021), with music by John Young; and On Our Way (2024), a short comic opera by Nathan Wasner. In 2023, Alan premiered his first oratorio, Yosef and the Counseling Angel, with music by Cole Thomason-Redus, and his music-drama Concerto with The Lyric Theatre of Oklahoma in partnership with The Oklahoma City Philharmonic.
Recently, Synchromy presented a workshop of his opera Midnight to Midnight, with music by Dante de Silva, at Sony Studios in Culver City during the World Opera Forum and the Opera America Conference in Los Angeles. Next spring, Atlas of Remote Islands will be remounted at the Dairy Arts Center in Boulder, Colorado, and the SHORTS festival with Cape Town Opera in South Africa. His short opera Petrov with music by Sergey Nesterov will receive a workshop production at The Wende Museum in Culver City, CA, and be produced by Synchromy. Alan also created a new opera adaptation with Grant Preisser of Hector Berlioz's Beatrice + Benedict with Orlando Opera. Alan will work alongside Stephanie Fleishman and Magdalene Minnar to teach Staging Stories, a libretto writing workshop for Cape Town Opera in South Africa. He'll mentor three artists presenting their original librettos for their SHORTS festival for March 2025. Alan is also a Resident Writer for The Proscenium, a London-based online theatre company. Their first season features his plays Next of Kin and Helt Texas and an adaptation of A Christmas Carol written with David Ricardo-Pearce. Artist residencies are an important part of Alan's writing practice. Alan was the Artist in Residence for Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park and the first playwright ever selected by the National Parks Arts Foundation. His other artist residencies span the globe, including Micro Galleries in Pātan, Nepal; Nes Residency in Skagaströnd, Iceland; Nocefresca in Milis, Sardinia; and the prestigious The Arctic Circle Residency, where he sailed the icy waters around Svalbard for two expeditions. In January, Alan will be in residence at Château d-Orquevaux in France. Alan is a member of Opera America and the National Opera Association and currently sits on the Dramatist Guild's Opera Committee and the Advisory Council of Opera Parallèle. Alan was a former board member of Theater Bay Area and Opera Parallèle. Full Resume Storytelling is another reinvention. Before becoming a writer, Alan spent twelve years in the wine industry, starting at the City Grill in Atlanta and culminating as the Sommelier of the Dining Room at the Ritz Carton—Buckhead, a Mobil Five-Star, AAA Five-Diamond restaurant. He then transitioned into the field of education, working as a special educator for sixteen years, focusing primarily on reading acquisition for elementary and middle-school students. "How in the heck do you pronounce that last name?" OH/la/KNEE/check |