Hogrefe Visiting Writer Series: Kira Obolensky

CATEGORIES: Department Events
April 8, 2019, 8:00pm | Pioneer Room, Memorial Union

Epic, Funny, Sad, Strange, True: The Stories We Tell and Why We Tell Them

Kira Obolensky

Monday, April 8, 2019, 8:00 pm, Pioneer Room, Memorial Union

In this lecture, Kira Obolensky will talk about her work as a playwright-in-residence with the award-winning Ten Thousand Things.  Over the course of ten years, Kira has written a body of work that has been successfully performed for audiences in prisons, shelters, low-income centers, immigrant training centers, community centers, and rural Minnesota, as well as for a theatre-savvy audience in the Twin Cities. She’ll discuss her discoveries and share some techniques for thinking about stories as a way to engage collective imaginations.  

Kira Obolensky is currently a Mellon Foundation Playwright-in-Residence with Ten Thousand Things, an award-winning theatre company based in Minneapolis. She has co-created and written seven plays for TTT, which have performed for audiences in prisons, shelters, teen pregnancy programs, community centers in rural and urban areas, low income senior centers, psychiatric wards, immigrant and adult education programs, chemical dependency centers, as well as to paying audiences in the Twin Cities.  Recent non-TTT productions include Stewardess (History Theater), Why We Laugh: A Terezin Cabaret (international festivals in Prague and Terezin, Fortune’s Fool in Minneapolis), and Cabinet of Wonders (Gas and Electric Arts, Open Eye Figure Theatre).  Kira is a Guggenheim Fellow and the recipient of many awards and fellowships, including the Kesselring Prize and the Jerome Foundation grant. She attended Juilliard’s Playwriting Program and is a core writer at The Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis. Kira teaches playwriting at the University of Minnesota and is on the faculty of Spalding University’s Low-Residency MFA in Writing Program.