About
Noëlle Janaczewska is Sydney-based writer of plays, monologues, poetry, spoken word, essays, radio scripts, libretti, gallery and on-line explorations. Her work has been performed, broadcast and published throughout Australia and overseas. Working across drama and non-fiction, recurring themes in her work are the history and philosophy of science (especially botany), colonialism and its legacies, narratives of place and migration, and the exploration of language/s.
A graduate of Oxford and London Universities, Noëlle worked with, and co-established, several theatre companies and contemporary arts groups, presenting work in Britain, Germany and The Netherlands, before moving to Australia in the late 1980s. Following 2 years as the Artistic Director of The Performance Space in Sydney, she returned to freelance practice with The History of Water/Huyền Thoại Một Giòng Nước, first produced by the Sydney Theatre Company in 1992, and published by Currency Press in 1995, following productions in London and Canada, Germany and Vietnam.
Noëlle’s numerous nominations, grants and prizes include the 2006 Queensland Premier’s Literary Award (Drama Script, Stage) for Mrs Petrov’s Shoe (Theatre @ Risk, 2006). Her play Songket, produced by the Griffin Theatre Company and The Studio at the Sydney Opera House to a sell-out season in 2003, won the 2002 Griffin Playwriting Award and the 2001 Playbox-Asialink Playwriting Competition. The recipient of a Centenary Medal for radio scriptwriting, an Asialink Literature Residency in Korea, and Fellowships from Varuna Writers’ Centre and the Theatre and Literature Boards of the Australia Council, Noëlle’s radio features There’s Something About Eels … and Let’s Go Brazil won AWGIE Awards in 2009 and 2006, as did her radio dramas The Rush Hour Carillon, Glissando 24 and Slowianska Street in 2005, 2001 and 1999. In 1997 she obtained her doctorate from the University of Technology, Sydney.
Recent works include Random Red and Weeds Etc for ABC Radio National in 2011 and 2010 respectively, Eyewitness Blues for the BBC, The Hannah First Collection, 1919—1949 for the Zendai Museum of Modern Art in Shanghai, Disappearance (The Border Project, 2008), Taishō Chick (Art Gallery of NSW, 2008), Fearless N (Theatre Kantanka/Sydney Olympic Park, 2008), the Movie Extra Award-winning short Duet With A Dictionary (Short & Sweet 2008, Movie Extra 2008), and This Territory, produced by the Australian Theatre for Young People in association with the Powerhouse Youth Theatre and the Sydney Opera House in 2007. In 2008 Currency Press published This Territory and Songket in a 2-play edition.
Noëlle is a member of the 7-ON playwrights group, whose inaugural project The Seven Needs was part of the Griffin Theatre Company‘s 2007 season. 7-ON’s current projects include Platonic, 6 short pieces on the theme of friendship in the contemporary world, and Zed, a theatrical response to/adaptation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra.
Alongside works for stage and radio, Noëlle publishes poems, essays, reviews, flash fiction and other short pieces in anthologies, arts journals and on-line magazines, including: Jacket, Cordite, extempore, Island, Scan, HEAT, Southerly, Imago, Voices and RePublica. The poems she wrote for Kathryn Millard‘s film Travelling Light feature on the soundtrack CD, produced by the ABC & Universal Music Australia, and in 2006 Wayzgoose Press published her long poem Dorothy Lamour’s Life as a Phrasebook.
