Artist Profile
Laurel Ollstein is a playwright, writer, director and educator whose plays most recently have been produced at The Old Globe and TheatreWorks Silicon Valley. Other plays produced across the county include: Pandora!; Unhappily Married in Valencia; They Promised Her the Moon; Esther’s Moustache; Bias Cut; Showing Our Age; OPA! the musical; Dorothy Parker is in the Bath and The Dark Ages. She was part of the writing team for a podcast radio drama for New Conservatory Theatre Center in San Francisco. Laurel has been commissioned to write new works by The Getty Villa, About Productions, Virginia Avenue Project, New Jersey Repertory Company, Playwrights’ Arena, and Clark Library, and she has developed plays with TheatreWorks Silicon Valley, The Actors’ Gang, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Skylight Theatre, The Road Theatre Company, The Barrow Group, Miranda Theatre Company, and Playwrights’ Center among others. Several of her television and film projects have been optioned for development.
Her awards include grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and California Arts Council, as well as Ovation, Garland, and LA Weekly Theater Awards. She wrote the first draft of They Promised Her the Moon at The University of Oklahoma, where she was a Faith Broome Playwright-in-Residence and the recipient of a 2018 Social Impact Theatre Grant from The Sheri and Les Biller Family Foundation.
Laurel also directs playwriting programs, provides writing and arts education in schools and for mature adults, and creates plays on social justice themes. She has served as adjunct faculty at California Institute of the Arts, UCLA, Loyola Marymount University, University of Redlands, and Otis College of Art and Design.
Ollstein holds an MFA in playwriting from the School of Theater, Film and Television at UCLA.
