Art Fridays: Studio Visit with Artist and Playwright Oana Maria Cajal

Our Art Fridays series continues with a colorful, revelatory portrait of Oana Maria Cajal, the Montreal-based, Romanian-American visual artist, award wining playwright, screenwriter, and poet whose flaring imagination and polymorphous talent have been recognized with many accolades and prizes in North America and Europe. 

Watch on our Facebook, IGTV and YouTube on March 12 at 2 p.m. New York & Toronto time / 11 a.m. Los Angeles & Vancouver time / 9 p.m. Bucharest time. Watch also on our website and other social media accounts anytime later.

Born in Bucharest, under the mesmerizing gaze of Brancusi's Miss Pogany, the soul of her grandfather's art collection and her inspiring Muse for life, Oana Maria Cajal immigrated to the United States in 1980 upon receiving a grant from the American Theatre Association.  She attended the Ph.D. Theatre Criticism program at New York's City University and then moved to California where she obtained her M.F.A. in Playwriting from University of California San Diego (UCSD).

Her first play, “East European Tetralogy”, was nominated by the San Diego Theatre Critics Circle for Best New Play of the year, 1986. Most of Oana’s plays were produced and well received in cities across America. Among them “Berlin/Berlin”, “Exchange at Cafe Mimosa”, “The Almond Seller”, “The Enduring Legend of Marinka Pinka and Tommy Atomic”, “Waiting for Godot to Leave”.

Oana Maria Cajal is a Fulbright scholar and a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Playwriting Fellowship and many art prizes. She is also a member of Dramatists Guild of America, Writers Union of Romania, Theater Union of Romania (UNITER), the Union of Fine Artists of Romania, Playwrights Workshop Montreal, and Playwrights Guild of Canada.

Her play, “The Last Pact” was voted “Best Play of 2011” by UNITER. Oana’s screenplay for the feature film “The White Gate” was nominated for the Gopo Awards, 2015.

Her prolific activity as a visual artist extended over the years in many solo exhibitions in Canada, the United States and Romania, even though her yearning for a sense of belonging somewhere was never reconciled. She is calling her art space a “Transcultural Gastropod Studio”.