Irena Kowal was born to Ukrainian émigrés in a displaced person’s camp in West Germany. She grew up in the United States and was educated in America, England, and France.      

            For fifteen years Kowal lived in Germany, England, and Ukraine with her husband and two children. She worked as a freelance journalist for BBC Ukraine. She is the author of The Barefoot Ballerina, a novella, and two produced plays. The Lion and the Lioness was produced at the National Theatre in Kiev and The Marinated Aristocrat is playing in Kiev in its twelfth year in repertory. She organized a drama conference in Kiev with four leading British dramatists. She wrote, choreographed and directed three tableaux for the 200th gala birthday concert of the Ukrainian bard Taras Shevchenko at the Longy School of Music in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

            She is writing a commissioned play A WOMAN IN TWO.