KIRA

Kira Obolensky’s plays have been produced Off-Broadway, in regional theaters, and presented in festivals in Prague and Terezin. She has received the Kesselring Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Mellon Playwright Fellowship in residence with the award-winning theater Ten Thousand Things.

The Mellon fellowship allowed her to develop a body of work that considers audiences beyond the traditional, mainstream theater. These plays were written and conceived to be performed by a company of excellent actors, with sets stripped down to the minimum, all the lights on and presented in sites ranging from places of incarceration, to rural Minnesota, to homeless shelters.

She co-wrote the national bestseller The Not So Big House Book, and her fiction has appeared in such publications as Quarterly West and The Brooklyn Review. Recent stage work includes her adaptation of Ostrovsky’s Wolves and Sheep; breakfastlunchdinner; and The Lion, a short film featuring Judith Roberts and directed by Abigail Zealey Bess. Kira attended Williams College and Juilliard’s Playwriting Program. She is a core writer at the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis, teaches playwriting at the University of Minnesota and is on faculty at Spalding University’s Naslund Mann School of Writing.