Olga El is an award-winning, emerging playwright who aims to educate and engage audiences in ways that inspire change—on the level of the personal, communal, or beyond—that will ultimately lead to a more just, compassionate, and healthy society. Soulful and ambitious, her work finds its foundation outside of conventional playwriting traditions and serves as a platform for diverse stories that don't often have representation in mainstream art and entertainment worlds. Movement—particularly martial arts; aerial arts; and dances from North Africa, West Africa, and the Diaspora—is seamlessly interwoven into her work.

For 2023, she's been offered Hedgebrook and VCCA residencies, she was chosen for Theater of Change cohort at Columbia U, and she will collaborate with the Shinnecock Nation on their ancestral lands as part of an artist residency at Ma's House (attendance terms are still being negotiated for some opportunities.)

In 2022, she completed a fellowship at the Sewanee Writers' Conference; a writing residency at WCDH, a development cohort with Dramatic Question Theatre, and she was a semi-finalist for a fellowship to the National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center—the top 15% of almost 1500 applications.

At the end of 2019, two of her scripts (Jaguar Woman and 1001 Nights...) were solicited by MCC to be considered for Off-Broadway commissions (the script for 1001 Nights... was also solicited by The Public Theater in 2015). Jaguar Woman went on to win 1st place in the script category of the 90th Annual Writer’s Digest Competition in 2021. She's also received several other awards throughout the years, such as a Brooklyn Arts Council grant, a Citizen's Committee for New York grant, and a dance residency from the Jamaica Performing Arts Center.

In 2011 she founded The Kandake Dance Theatre for Social Change after years of experimenting with similar projects. Through the dance-theatre she creates free and low-cost community initiatives, street art, full-length theatrical works, wellness retreats, workshops, and a variety of other shows, events, and virtual offerings that are immersive, accessible, and unique.

She's had the opportunity to offer arts programming to marginalized populations such as women who were formerly incarcerated (or otherwise struggling with the system) and the children of sex workers from Mumbai. Her plays have been translated and performed in Spanish she has performed for HBO, BAM, PlayStation Theater, Webster Hall, House of Yes, Dixon Place, TED Med, Park Avenue Armory, The Lincoln Center, and more.

Learn more about her work at www.TheKandake.com. Capoeira é vida