Richard Allen

Born in the country town of Kempsey, New South Wales, Australia, and now living in Sydney after many years spent in the USA, Europe and Asia, Richard James Allen has combined a unique international career as a writer, performer, choreographer and filmmaker. His poetry, plays, performance texts and films have been published, broadcast, performed and screened in thirty countries. He has been nominated for or won major prizes in poetry, filmmaking, screenwriting, playwriting, and dance.

Richard writes across a number of forms. His first novel, "The Kamikaze Mind", will be published by Brandl & Schlesinger in June 2006. A recent feature film screenplay was shortlisted for the 2004 Rodney Seaborn Playwrights Award. A theatrical monologue presented by the 2000 Sydney Writers Festival, was shortlisted for the 2001 Griffin Award for New Australian Playwriting. Richard's seventh book of poetry, "Thursday's Fictions" (Five Island Press), was launched at the 1999 Australian Poetry Festival, which he directed, and was shortlisted for the 2000 NSW Premier's Literary Award. 1999 also saw the publication, after many years of research, of the landmark collection, co-edited with Karen Pearlman, "Performing the Unnameable: An Anthology of Australian Performance Texts" (Currency Press/RealTime).

Richard has been a judge of numerous Sydney performance poetry competitions including the Poetry Olympiad and the NSW Writers Centre Poetry Sprint. He is the former President and Artistic Director of the Poets Union and Co-Artistic Director of the Tasmanian Poetry and Dance Festival during his period as Co-Artistic Director of Tasdance.

A director, choreographer and dancer as well as a writer, Richard has completed a number of films for his company, The Physical TV Company, which have been shown at more than 150 festivals and screenings around the world, broadcast on television in Australia, Europe and China, and won numerous awards. He is the 2006 recipient of the prestigious Chancellor's Award for the most outstanding PhD thesis from across all departments of the University of Technology, Sydney, for his Doctorate of Creative Arts, "Out Of The Labyrinth Of The Mind: Manifesting A Spiritual Art Beyond Dualism". At its world premiere at the Park City Film Music Festival in Utah in January 2006, his latest film, a screen adaptation of his last book, the NSW Premiere's Literary Award-nominated "Thursday's Fictions", won the Gold Medal for Excellence ' Director's Choice for Artistic Excellence in a Feature Film.