DIANA KOLPAK

Director. Performer. Writer.

Diana has directed and helped develop more than a dozen original productions that have been performed from Victoria to Montreal, as well as directing Canadian premieres (Ines de Castro), modern classics (Endgame, Man is Man) and Shakespeare (King John, All’s Well that Ends Well, A Midsummer Night's Dream).  She also curated both sold-out incarnations of Téatro Magnetico's  pandemonium machine and was the sole Canadian invited to perform at clownin, an international festival of women clowns, in Vienna, Austria in 2010.

Performance credits include: Hit & Run (Scaramella Chamber Orchestra), Tears of a Clown (Toronto Masque Theatre), Goodnight, Ladies (Rhubarb! 2004), Butterfly Body (Nightwood Groundswell Festival) and cabaret performances at the Toronto Festival of Clowns, The Keith Cole Experience, The Needle Exchange, Cheap Queers, Homo Night in Canada, The International Circus Festival, Lunacy Cabaret, Cabaret Vulgaire, The S.P.A.C.E., Clown Chowder and Cirque du Poulet.

Diana's first children's book, Starfall, created with Toronto photographer Kathleen Finlay, is the story of one clown's quest to re-light the stars and is published by Red Deer Press.  Her first script, Bedtime Stories, was published in Ontario Playwrights: Eight Short Plays (Playwrights Canada Press) and excerpted in Taking the Stage: Plays by Canadian Women  and The Urbanite, a magazine of surreal urban fiction.  Other writing credits include her one-woman show Lionheart and a plethora of speculative fiction short stories.

Diana has an M.F.A. in Directing from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She studied clown with some of Canada's foremost practitioners, and has taught clown workshops at the Ontario Institute for Secondary Education, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre and the University of Illinois. www.dianakolpak.ca