Meet our Theatre & Communications Director

For fourteen years, Brian Oglesby helped run Barnyard Theatre, a company he co-founded in northern California that produced new plays in a 120-year-old, dirt-floored barn. Barnyard affirmed his beliefs in learning by doing. He believes people should make the things that they wish to see in this world.

He is a professional playwright whose mission in life has been to demonstrate that theatre for teens can be art. Before Appamada (formerly Skybridge), he moved to Austin to pursue his MFA in Playwriting at the University of Texas. There, he founded The Bridge Festival, which had graduate students mentor undergraduates in the writing of ten-minute plays. He also has an MFA in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts from the University of California, Riverside, with an emphasis in Fiction, where he taught both creative writing and beginning acting classes.

He writes plays for and with teens using collaborative techniques that he has been developing since his time at UT. His “All-Audience” adaptation of The Jungle Book was initially produced in Sacramento and was published by Stage Rights, and his fairy-tale-based The Twelve Huntsmen was commissioned by Acme Theatre before being published by Stage Partners; both have been produced numerous times.  At Appamada School, he has penned more than twenty plays, most of which have been produced by high schools, middle schools, and colleges across the country and internationally. Some of his plays have gone on to have professional workshops at theatres and colleges or have been finalists for prestigious awards usually given to theatre-for-mature audiences. His plays The Apocalypse Project, Sink! A Titanic Murder Mystery, and The Odyssey: a series of banquets were all picked up by publishers. 

His work for mature audiences also has a long resume: he won the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival’s Latino Playwright Award; his plays have been developed at the JAW Festival and Playwrights Week at the Lark in New York twice; he has won the award for Outstanding Playwriting from the New York Fringe Festival; his fiction has been published in the literary journals Indiana Review, ZYZZYVA, New California Writing, among others. And yet, he is most proud of the work he does creating and advocating for theatre for young actors. He believes theatre for teens should be fun, it should be better because it’s performed by teens, it should be entertaining while being about something, it should be bold, and it should be art.

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