Olena Kirichek

Olena Kirichek is a philologist, screenwriter and playwright.

From 2015 to 2018 she studied foreign philology and translation at the Kyiv National University of Culture and Arts. In 2017 she took part in the European theatre residency “Theatre Dialogue – Dialogue of Cultures” at GOGOLFEST and worked at the Odesa International Film Festival.

In 2018 she joined 435 FILMS as a producer’s assistant and screenwriter, working on Numbers (dir. Oleg Sentsov and Akhtem Seitablayev), Reserve Askania (dir. Andrii Lytvynenko), 2020. Deserted Country (dir. Kornii Hrytsiuk) and Hero of My Time (dir. Tonya Noyabrova). The same year she studied playwriting at the Les Kurbas Centre under the mentorship of Neda Nezhdana, and in 2018–2019 she took part in the Kinoscript screenwriting festival.

In 2019 she attended film courses in Grenoble, France, run by the Polish-French film academy Kinographe. In 2019–2020 she completed a year-long Erasmus+ and European Solidarity Corps volunteer programme in Latvia: she studied visual-arts dramaturgy at the Latvian Academy of Culture, worked as an assistant administrator at the independent Ģertrūdes ielas teātris in Riga, published short stories in the online magazine Voice.Latvia, and took part in the first playwriting laboratory of the National Union of Theatre Artists of Ukraine.