Kira Obolensky

Kira Obolensky’s plays have been produced Off Broadway, in Los Angeles, in Prague and Terezin, and in such locations as homeless shelters, prisons, and immigrant centers. She has received the Kesselring Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship and most recently a Mellon Playwright Fellowship, which put her in residence with the award-winning theater Ten Thousand Things for six years.   She co-wrote a national bestseller about architecture; her novella, The Anarchists Float to St. Louis, won Quarterly West’s Novella prize.  She attended Juilliard’s Playwriting Program, Williams College and is a core writer at the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis.

WEBSITE and SOCIAL MEDIA
http://www.kobolensky.com
IG:kiraobolensky

MORE ABOUT ME

I love hearing an audience laugh. When I wrote for Ten Thousand Things' audiences  I would wait with bated breath for the moment in which I could hear the people in the audience, often with things on their mind far more important than a play, laugh together. I then knew that they were in it; that they'd come anywhere with us. I think we tell stories to imagine new worlds together--there's something so essential, so hopeful, so moving to me about gathering imaginations in service to summoning a world that a playwright creates with actors, directors and other theater artists.

WHAT I'M WORKING ON
A musical with David Darrow about the doctor who tried to measure human souls during the consumption epidemic. (Susan Sontag makes an appearance in it!)  Also, some television pilots, a detective novel and a film about my father's caregivers.

KEYWORDS
Feminist, Adaptations, Historical, Fables/Fairytales, Puppets, Comedy