Virlana Tkacz

Virlana Tkacz (born June 23, 1952, in Newark, New Jersey) is the founding director of the Yara Arts Group, a resident company at the world-renowned La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in New York. She was educated at Bennington College and Columbia University, where she earned a Master of Fine Arts in theatre directing.

With Yara she created forty original theatre pieces that fuse fragments of contemporary poetry and traditional songs, chants, legends and history from East to create an imagistic production with a narrative. Experimental in their form and essence, they employ video, projected images, and complex musical scores to explore our relationship to time and consciousness. Recent Yara pieces include "1917-2017: Tychyna Zhadan & the Dogs" was about the violence of war and received two New York Innovative Theatre Awards. [http://www.nyitawards.com/news/newsitem.asp?storyid=419] Recently, she directed Yara's "Radio 477!" about Kharkiv, Ukraine, based on a jazz score from Kharkiv in 1929. Provided by Wikipedia