Patti A. Dobrowolski

Since 1983, Patti Dobrowolski has received numerous awards and critical acclaim for her innovative work using character comedy in multi-media context. The Adventures Of A Lucky Dog toured from Seattle to the Bay area and was featured at the National Women's Theater Festival in Santa Cruz,CA. Pauli Moran's Attention Span (collaborator Molly Thompson) won the Best of the Festival award at New City Theater's Director's Festival in Seattle, WA. It was commissioned for performance at Bumbershoot and expanded into a full scale production Farmgirls which premiered at Centrum's Summer Art's Festival in Port Townsend, WA.

Dobrowolski has performed repeatedly for ON THE BOARDS with Intermission Impossible and was commissioned for two seasons of Northwest New Works Festival. Mind Over Matter: Dr. Barbato Explains the 80 'S (collaborator Sally Cloninger) was hailed by the Seattle Times as a "fabulously inventive, furiously paced and fitfully funny examination of a decade in progress." Terrestial Implements (director Paul Repetowski) "bears the unmistakable mark of her wacko sense of humor and social conscience" in a performance which examines gardens throughout history.

She was awarded a PERFORMA '87 grant for a collaborative performance with Bay Area choreographer Deborah Slater. The Transit Project, which took place on a Metro bus traveling through downtown Seattle, followed the relationship between two women and their immigrant grandmothers in "a touching story of women shoulder to shoulder in a strange new land." - Seattle Post Intelligencer Dobrowolski made her Broadway debut in 1989 in Bill Irvin's Largely New York having first toured as part of the Seattle Repertory Theatre and Kennedy Center casts. She performed with Largely New York at the 1990 Tony Awards Ceremonies and its subsequent production at the Golden Gate Theatre in San Francisco.

The production Inside Out (collaborator Nancy Harrington) took a satiric look at therapy trends, and premiered at PS 122 and Dance Theatre Workshop in NYC as part of the Out-of-Towner's Series. DANCE Magazine critics claimed "The skits do not outstay their welcome and the pace is deftly maintained with slick technical mounting, seamless staging and sharp writing." After a brief tour to The New Rose Theatre, Portland, OR., Dobrowolski took a leave from performance to attend graduate school.

In 1992, Dobrowolski teamed with Brenda Way to write Western Women, a dance performance about the settling of the West in collaboration with Eleanor Coppola, Christine Walker, Bobby McFerrin, Voicestra, and ODC/San Francisco Dance company, which premiered in San Francisco and continues touring as part of ODC's repertory.

Nancy Cranbourne invited Dobrowolski to co-write and coach Cranboune in the production of My Dead Friends, The Unbreaking Of A Heart in 1996 at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. In 1997 Dobrowolski returned to the stage to join Cranbourne in Sorry 'Bout That, a comic dance-theatre duet performed at the Changing Scene in Denver, CO. It was in 1998, after realizing they weren't getting any younger, Cranbourne and Dobrowolski, in collaborative commiseration, wrote
2 Women Avoiding Involuntary Hospitalization which ran to sold out houses at BMOCA in Boulder, CO. The play was nominated for 1999 Best New Play of the Year by the Denver/Boulder Drama Critics Circle.