Madeleine Olnek


Madeleine Olnek is an independent American film director, producer, screenwriter, and playwright. She has written 24 plays and three feature films, including Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same and Wild Nights with Emily. Her feature films have been described as "madcap comedies with absurdist leanings" and are all centered around lesbian characters.

Biography

Olnek was born in New York City and raised in Connecticut. She studied drama at NYU and graduated in 1987, and also has an MFA in creative writing from Brown University and an MFA in film from Columbia University. She became a member of the advocacy group ACT UP in the late 80s and early 90s.
After graduating from NYU, she worked with WOW Café theater in New York where she wrote Fan Mail with Nancy Swartz, as well as Wild Nights with Emily and Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same. Olnek began to realize that technological advances in the film industry were making it "the place of immediacy", so she began to focus on filmmaking. She made her first short film Hold Up in 2006 and another Countertransference in 2009, both of which screened at the Sundance Film Festival. Olnek was awarded a Women in Film grant for Countertransference.
In 2011 Olnek adapted one of her plays into her first feature film Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same, which played at Sundance and was nominated in the category of Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You at the 2011 Gotham Independent Film Awards. Her second feature film The Foxy Merkins also played at Sundance and other festivals, and included some of the actors from Codependent. Olnek received research grants from Harvard University Press and the Guggenheim Foundation to adapt another of her plays into her third feature, Wild Nights with Emily, which premiered in 2018. She is currently working on a new project with Peg Healey of The Five Lesbian Brothers.

Personal life

Madeleine Olnek is a lesbian and lives in New York City.

Filmography

Selected plays