The Modjeska Club is pleased to present actress and author Beata Pozniak on Saturday, February 27, 2021, at 7 pm via Zoom. The program will include video and a live performance, as well as interview by Maja Trochimczyk and Elizabeth Kanski. The meeting room information will be distributed to guests and members of the Club via email.
Beata Poźniak, an actress, voice over artist, activist, painter and poet. She narrated the #1 bestseller, “The Winter Palace: A Novel of Catherine the Great”, a 19 hour audiobook for Random House, where she made use of her European background in bringing to life the 78 characters and their colorful accents. After embodying one of the most intriguing women in history, she read another 19 hour story of the “Empress of the Night: A Novel of Catherine the Great”. This was followed by a teen romance/adventure/sci-fi thriller, “The Illuminae Files”, by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff, which won an AUDIE Award. After that, she co-narrated “The Tsar of Love and Techno” by Anthony Maara which was selected in the Top 5 Best Audiobooks of the year by The Washington Post. “Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead”, the finalist for the Man Booker International Prize by a NOBEL Prize winner in Literature, Olga Tokarczuk read by Beata, which earned her an EARPHONES Award for Best Performance and interpretation.
Also, recently she narrated and produced the European Homer Award winning book, “Libretto for the Desert” poetry dedicated to the victims of genocide and war for which she received the 2019 International Maria Konopnicka Award. And was nominated for the 2019 Voice Arts Award. For ‘The Light in Hidden Places” by Scholastic, she received an 2020 Earphones Award and a 2020 Voice Arts Award nomination in the Outstanding Audiobook Narration Category https://soundcloud.com/beata-pozniak/light-in-hidden-places-scholastic-audio . For performing LIVE at The HAMMER Museum Wislawa Szymborska’s poetry, she was nominated for a Voice Arts Award https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haV8ltlVuVI&t=17s
Beata won the 2020 Voice Arts Award in the "Outstanding Video Game Character - Best Performance" Category for voicing Skarlet, the Blood Queen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tY2mKe2vr4 In the almost 30 years of the Mortal Kombat franchise, Beata is the first actor to receive such a prestigious honor for voicing one of the characters.
- “Beata Pozniak is the Empress of Audiobooks." Hollywood Today
- “Narrator Beata Poźniak is a master of the many accents.” AudioFile Magazine
- “Beata Poźniak is the first non-native English speaking narrator hired by the largest publisher in the world – Random House…” The Hollywood Times
On screen she is remembered as Gary Oldman’s on-screen wife, Marina Oswald in Oliver Stone’s eight times Oscar nominated film “JFK” and the first female President of the World in the hit SCI-FI series “Babylon 5”. On “Mad About You” played Helen Hunt’s and Paul Reiser’s maid, then Irene, a revolutionary overthrowing the Russian government in George Lucas’s “Young Indiana Jones: Russian Revolution 1917”, and a double agent working for the CIA and Mossad on the hit TV series “JAG” .
Recently she played a cameo in a feature based on true facts about 1930’s genocide Holodomor - “Mr. Jones” – she plays a historical figure, a journalist that gets deported from Soviet Union for reporting to the west. She played Beata, an actress a WW2 survivor in “All These Voices” for which it won a student OSCAR. On “Melrose Place” she played Dr. Fielding a single mom marrying a gay character, who becomes a father to her child . She also narrated documentaries such as, “The Officer’s Wife” about the mass murder of Polish officers in the Katyn forrest and co-narrated “Freedom from Despair”, a film about communism, which won several Awards and received an honorable mention in the US Congress. As a co-producer, she is proud to be associated with "An Unknown Country” which received a nomination for EMMY Award for Best Documentary.
An Earphones Award Winner and a Voice Arts Award Winner – “this is a very special honor for me particularly that not long ago it would have been unthinkable to cast a female voice over actress and narrator for whom English was a second language. These voice awards are proof that in the immortal words of Bob Dylan, “The times they are a-changin’.”.
Beata has directed multi award winning experimental film poems. “People on the Bridge” is inspired by Hiroshige Utagawa ukiyo - art piece and a poem written by Nobel Prize winner Wislawa Szymborska. “Mnemosyne – International Women’s Day” is based on a poem and a painting that Pozniak created https://www.amazon.com/Beata-Pozniak-March-International-Womens/dp/B00KVVCJAM . The work depicts a community of all races of the world in a female form. It evokes the achievements of women along their struggle for peace and equality in the face of discrimination and war.
Pozniak has also written and directed experimental stage plays based on poetry. Among them are “Immigration and the American Experience”, “Poeticus Umbilicus” or “We and They”. The later and “The Return of Umbilicus” was selected for the Peter Sellars’s International Theatre Festival. As a poet, in 2019 she was invited by the Yale Club to read her work. Her poems have been translated into Armenian, Greek, Korean and Polish. Last year, her poems were published in Swansea “The Seventh Quarry Poetry” and also in Bengali – Bilingual Poetry Magazine “Shabdaguchha”. This year her poetry is included in “Musings During a Time of Pandemic - A Wold Anthology of Poems on COVID-19” and “I Can’t Breathe: A Poetic Anthology of Fresh Air” a compilation of poems that focuses on racism, colonialism, slavery, freedom, justice and human rights. Beata is a human rights activist, and introduced the first bill in the history of US Congress to recognize officially International Women’s Day in the United States.
For several years Beata served and serves as one of the Judges for the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences EMMY Awards. She is a classically trained actress and holds a Masters of Fine Arts Degree in Film and Drama and for several years served on the faculty at USC - Masters Degree Program.
More info: https://www.beata.com
https://www.huffpost.com/author/beata-pozniak
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beata_Po%C5%BAniak
https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beata_Po%C5%BAniak
Videos to enjoy:
1) Overview, Grammy Foundation Induction: https://youtu.be/nd5lA2WOI0Y
2) Mortal Kombat's Scarlet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tY2mKe2vr4
3) Szymborska at Hammer Museum: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haV8ltlVuVI&t=17s
4) Kinga Rusin Interview: https://youtu.be/6xxPflVsmqs (in Polish)
5) Intl. Women's Day Art: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMzZ3OulfeI
6) Best Voiceover Award: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXuEXnZtXJA
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