Bachelor of Arts in Communication, 1983
Arts and Social Sciences Award and Chancellor's Award for Excellence
Alana Valentine is one of Australia’s most highly respected playwrights whose visionary work puts the human experience squarely on centre stage.
Throughout her distinguished career, Alana has collaborated with a host of Australian communities to ensure a diverse range of marginalised voices are heard. With care and sensitivity, she has developed works with a long and original list of real people with real stories – including women incarcerated in managed care for being ‘uncontrollable’, prison inmates and their families, high school children who have been cyberbullied, flood victims, and Pitjantjatjara dialysis patients.
Her highest profile work, Parramatta Girls, was produced by Belvoir Street Theatre well before the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse began. Other work that has toured extensively is Letters to Lindy and Head Full of Love, and The Sugar House will have its European premier at the Finborough Theatre in October 2021.
Alana has had three plays included on the NSW HSC Drama syllabus – Parramatta Girls, Run Rabbit Run and Shafana and Aunt Sarrinah – and published more than 20 works including two books of non-fiction. Her writing appears in numerous collections and anthologies. She has written for mainstream and independent television, produced short films and is an acclaimed multi-media artist, librettist and dramaturg, working with Bangarra Dance Theatre, Belvoir Theatre, Merrigong Theatre, Bunya (Film) Productions and the 2022 Adelaide Festival.
She has won countless accolades including four Australian Writers Guild awards, an AWGIE Award and a Churchill Fellowship. As co-writer, with Ursula Yovich, of Barbara and the Camp Dogs she won Best Musical and Best Original Score at the 2019 Helpmann Awards, the highest accolade of the Australian Entertainment Industry.
In 2021 Alana wrote and directed the Sydney Festival/Walkley Award series The Journalist Gene, innovatively incorporating interview panels as a performance element. In April 2022 Belvoir will present her commissioned play Wayside Bride about people who were married at the Chapel in Kings Cross.
You can never be too earnest or too individual if you want to succeed in the Australian theatre.
Alana's photo is courtesy of Vicki Gordon.