Ken LaZebnik

Ken LaZebnik is a playwright and screenwriter whose work has been produced at theaters across America, and whose film and TV scripts have ranged from collaborations with Garrison Keillor and Robert Altman, to the popular CBS series Touched by An Angel. His plays have frequently been premiered at The Mixed Blood Theatre in Minneapolis, and Artistic Director Jack Reuler has directed all of them. The most recent of these collaborations was On The Spectrum, which premiered in November, 2011. On The Spectrum was awarded a Steinberg Citation from the American Theatre Critics Association, honoring it as one of the three best new plays produced outside of New York during the year. This spring, On The Spectrum had a successful run in Los Angeles at the Fountain Theatre. Other plays Mixed Blood has premiered include Vestibular Sense, League of Nations, and Calvinisms. Together with Garrison Keillor, LaZebnik co-wrote director Robert Altman's last film: A Prairie Home Companion, starring Meryl Streep, Lindsay Lohan, and John C. Reilly. LaZebnik has a long history of writing for Garrison Keillor's "Prairie Home Companion" radio show. LaZebnik's wrote the Lionsgate film Thomas Kinkade's Christmas Cottage, released in 2008. It stars Peter O'Toole as the popular painter Thomas Kinkade's mentor; Marcia Gay Harden plays Kinkade's mother. LaZebnik's play Rachel Calof, adapted from the memoir of a Jewish homesteader in North Dakota, premiered at the New York International Fringe Festival in August, 2011. His play Theory of Mind, commissioned for young audiences by the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, has also been produced in Minnesota, Hawaii and Michigan. For television, he has written on series as varied as Touched By An Angel, Providence, and Star Trek: Enterprise. During his seven-year tenure on Touched By An Angel, he wrote over twenty episodes, including four popular Christmas episodes which have been released on DVD. In 2012 LaZebnik wrote an episode of Army Wives, and is currently writing for an upcoming Hallmark Channel show, When Calls The Heart. He wrote three PBS specials for their series "In Concert at the White House," which were filmed in the East Room of the White House. These featured such varied performers as Broadway stars Patti LuPone and Jennifer Holiday, and country star Toby Keith.