Biography

Olia Toporovsky blends the art of a short story, live performance and music, abstract visuals and some interactive theater to explore themes of identity, immigration, and freedom.  As a COJECO Blueprint Fellow, she developed The Fifth Paragraph, which has since been performed at multiple venues including The Tank theater, JCC Manhattan, JCC New Haven.

As part of this ongoing project, she has also led community-based story writing workshops with immigrants and children of immigrants that were created to empower poeple to write and understand themselves through the art of writing and storytelling. She helped the writers to edit and perform the stories live in  a two show series. 

Olia has a deep commitment to using creative expression to foster understanding and create meaningful and emotionally charged art, Olia continues to engage diverse audiences through innovative multimedia projects. Olia also uses video projection medium for live music performances including Jet Lag festival and a regular performance at Barbès in Brookly, as well as other music venues.

But what started it all was her writing. Olia has always written poetry and short stories. usually for herself. One of the stories, Goga, which is used now in the Fifth Paragraph performance was first published as  a short story in the Rumpus. This caused a ripple effect that led her to produce this body of work.