Beata Pozniak

Beata Pozniak won the prestigious Voice Arts Award in the "Outstanding Video Game Character - Best Performance" category for her role of Skarlet, the Blood Queen in "Mortal Kombat 11". She is also a five times Voice Arts Award nominee. Additionally Beata was honored by the Washington Post for the "Best Audiobook of the Year". She is a two-time Earphones Award Winner for audiobook narration: "Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead" by Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk and "The Light in Hidden Places" by #1 Bestselling New York Times author, Sharon Cameron. 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, for which she won a Croatian Heart Award together with John Savage and Michael York. This also received an honorable mention from the US Congress. She was a co-producer of "An Unknown Country" which received an EMMY Award nomination for Best Documentary. Beata grew up in Poland during the cold war and arrived in the US before the Berlin Wall came down. Her first film in America was Oliver Stone's eight-time Oscar nominated "JFK" where she played Marina Oswald, the on-screen wife of Gary Oldman. An experimental film "All These Voices" where she played a Holocaust survivor won a student Oscar. She embodied many diverse roles in TV, including Irene, a revolutionary in George Lucas's "Young Indiana Chronicles", Dr. Fielding on "Melrose Place", Masha on "Mad About You" and on "Babylon 5" she played a female President of the World. She founded Theater Discordia which was featured at Los Angeles Theater Festival and which evolved, with the participation of Peter Sellars, into a celebrated venue for experimental theater works. With time her company expanded into Discordia Global Media, where Pozniak directs films inspired by real events or by poetry. She has been named as one of the most important voices in videoart, filmpoems genre in an encyclopedic book "The Poetics of Poetry Film" published by IntellectBooks. She has been selected as the Poet of the Month by the Seventh Quarry Press. Her poetry has been translated into Armenian, Polish and Korean. Her latest anthology is from Africa "I Can't Breathe: A Poetic Anthology of Social Justice". Beata frequently sits on judging panels for the Television Academy, Primetime Emmy Awards and has been a Celebrity Presenter for the IFP (Independent Feature Project West) "Independent Spirit Awards," The Firebird Awards. She also presented posthumously an Award to Audrey Hepburn at the Human Rights Film Festival supported by the United Nations. A passionate human rights activist, Beata introduced the first bill in the history of the US Congress to recognize officially International Women's Day in the United States (H.J.R. 316) for which she was honored by the Mayor of Los Angeles and the US Congress. She received the Maria Konopnicka International Prize for "Outstanding Achievements in the Arts and for Championing Women's Rights Around the World". In the tradition of "Hollywood's Walk of Fame", she was acknowledged with a bronze hand in Poland's Walk of Fame. Appointed by the President of SAG-AFTRA to the Women's Commitee, she also often serves as a Juror, including for the EMMY Awards at the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. Pozniak holds an MFA in Film and Drama Arts. She has been on the faculty at USC (Master's Degree Program) and UCLA.