Lithuania Speakers 2017

I help people unlock their creativity so that they can live up to their full potential. I am a writer, director, producer, and performer who work across different media and continents. A winner of multiple awards, including a Fulbright fellowship and a Lithuanian national prize for the best fiction debut of the year, I had my plays presented at theatre festivals in Lithuania, Turkey, Russia, Estonia, and the USA. I published a collection of short stories and two best-selling novels, translated Leonard Cohen’s novel Beautiful Losers into Lithuanian, and directed the world premiere of site-specific concert opera Everardo II, King of Lithuania. Having earned my MA in Television, Radio, Film from the S.I.Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University (NY, USA) in 2010, I wrote for four television series, scripted Aristocrat of Ballet, a documentary for the Lithuanian National Television, as well as directed and produced Ethnic Kitchen, an internationally distinguished feature documentary about immigrant women in post-Soviet independent Lithuania. After working as a promotions producer, supervising producer, head of development, and head writer in Lithuanian narrative television for four seasons, I now own and run my own content production company The Ethnic Kitchen, which produces international interdisciplinary projects that use the media of film, music, visual and performing arts to raise society’s awareness to real daily instances of discrimination and oppression.