Biography

Alana valentine

Alana Valentine is a librettist, playwright and director.

Working in theatre, musical theatre, opera and screen, Alana is expert at working with real life subjects and stories, and dramatizing them with respect, insight and dynamism. Alana has three plays on the NSW HSC Syllabus – Parramatta Girls (Drama), Shafana and Aunt Sarrinah(English) and Cyberbile (Design). Her play Letters to Lindy, drawn from the 20,000 letters in the National Library of Australia has had hundreds of amateur and school productions.

Alana is particularly distinguished in her skills as a co-collaborator having worked in libretto and musical theatre such as Watershed: The Death of Dr Duncan (co-written with Christos Tsiolkas), Wudjang: Not the Past (co-written with Stephen Page) and Barbara and the Camp Dogs (co-written with Ursula Yovich) The latter won the 2019 Helpmann Award for Best Musical and Best Original Score, as well as numerous Green Room Awards.

Her most recent plays are Nucleus  for Griffin Theatre Company, Wayside Bride, The Sugar House for Belvoir Theatre and arc for erth physical and visual theatre. Alana has chronicled her practice as a close work/verbatim theatre maker in Bowerbird: The Art of Making Theatre Drawn From Lifeand in 2024 published Wed By The Wayside, a personal memoir about people married at the Wayside Chapel.

Alana’s screen projects include Barbara and the Camp Dogs with Bunya Productions, Offset with Jungle Pictures, Dubboo: The Song of David Page with Djali House Films, Torrent, about George Ian Ogilvie Duncan, and Saving the Music, with director Nadia Tass.

 

‘Valentine, an essential Australian dramatist, who writes the marginalised and oft-persecuted fringes of Australia into our dramatic canon with long-denied dignity and grace.’

– TIME OUT MAGAZINE

Alana is also an accomplished director, most recently directing Hannah Moloney’s Time Rebel for Ten Days on the Island in 2025, to a capacity audience at Hobart’s Theatre Royal, Burnie Town Hall and Launceston’s Ark. In 2024 Alana directed her AWGIE Award winning narrative poem Notre Dame, for the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra, premiering at the Melbourne Recital Hall, then Sydney City Recital Hall. In 2017 Alana was nominated as Best Director in the Tasmanian Theatre Awards for her direction of The Tree Widows for the Tasmanian Theatre Company, about an avenue of memorial trees in Hobart’s Domain, commissioned by Ten Days on the Island, Hobart City Council and the Friends of the Soldier’s Memorial Avenue. For the 2012 Festival of Sydney Alana directed Barefoot Divas: Walk A Mile In My Shoes, which toured to North America and Canada in 2014 and sold out the Hong Kong Concert Hall at the HKIAF in 2015. In 2016 Alana co-directed a production of One Billion Beats, co-written with Indigenous poet and visionary Romaine Moreton, presented at Campbelltown Arts Centre. In 2008 she wrote and directed Watermark for Katherine Regional Arts and Elderflowers for the Older and Wiser Festival in South Sydney in 2009. She also directed and wrote The Modest Aussie Cozzie for the St Ignatius College’s Storylines Cultural Festival in November 2009. Alana has also directed numerous children’s theatre productions including the stage plays The Prospectors and The Mapmaker’s Brother at the Australian National Maritime Museum, Radio Silence at the Australian War Memorial, and an 8 week sold out season of Ratticus and Reidar at the Hyde Park Barracks. For ABC Radio Alana directed more than thirty radio plays and features, working with hundreds of actors, technicians and other writers.

ALANA valentine in front of BBC building

News

Conversations Replay

Conversations Replay

ABC Radio's CONVERSATIONS will rebroadcast Sarah Kanowski's incredible conversation with Alana Valentine about her book WED BY THE WAYSIDE on Monday 17 March, 2025. First broadcast in July 2024, this one hour interview uncovers Alana's motivation for writing her stage...

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TIME REBEL

TIME REBEL

Hannah Moloney’s Time Rebel will be presented in Nipaluna/Hobart, Launceston, and Pataway/Burnie, featuring an extraordinary team of creative collaborators, including award-winning director Alana Valentine, musical director Amanda Hodder, and locally based community...

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Nucleus

Nucleus

14 Feb to 15 March Griffin Theatre at Seymour Centre Gabriel is a nuclear engineer. Cassie is an anti-nuclear campaigner. For nearly thirty years their lives have collided and entwined, with Cassie’s cause dominating public opinion across the decades. But with...

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