OONA WYNNE O'LEARY

Oona writes about characters trying their best for approval, primarily - but not exclusively - through horror and comedy. She’s performed sketch comedy across Chicago, and at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe with the London-based group Stand Up Tragedy. She wrote and produced BACKPAX, a live sitcom based on her expat days performed at The Second City’s DeMaat Theatre. An Araca Project alumna, her one-act play Please Go Gentle into that Good Night, about the inevitable death of a parent, ran at The American Theatre of Actors in New York. Her full-length horror screenplay EXPOSURE placed in the Krevoy Screenwriting Fund Prize. She was the 2022 HollyShorts Fellowship recipient at Stowe Story Labs and a quarterfinalist at CineStory for her supernatural hour-long pilot RE POSSESSED. Previously, she bartended in Xi’an China, taught English in Seoul, South Korea, and translated the complaints of Italian shoe manufacturers for a law firm in Newark, New Jersey. She co-hosts the weekly political podcast Gadfly.