Biography of Diana Kolpak

Diana would like to thank her parents for letting her read well past her bedtime, and for telling her she could be anything she wanted to be. These days she is a writer, performer and director who runs her own Dora Award-nominated theatre company, Whetstone Productions. Bedtime Stories was written while she was completing her MFA in Directing at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, and has been excerpted in Taking the Stage: Plays by Canadian Women (Playwrights Canada Press) and The Urbanite, a magazine of surreal urban fiction. Diana's writing is fuelled and influenced by theatrical clowning, vintage horror movies, world myths, science, magic and her parents' experiences as children in Poland during the Second World War. Lionheart, her most recent work, is a one-woman play about a lion tamer trapped in Death's foyer. Born in Lethbridge, Alberta to a family filled with entertainers, stories and superb superstitions, Diana now lives in Toronto with her husband, Michael Melling. When not writing plays, poems or speculative fiction, she can be found in her backyard, happily puttering in her garden.