Elena Penga
Elena Penga (; born ) is a Greek playwright, poet, fiction writer, and stage director. Penga attended college and graduate school in the United States and staged her first plays in New York’s off-off Broadway scene before returning to Greece in the 1990s. Her plays have been produced at the National Theatre of Greece, National Theatre of Northern Greece, the Athens Festival and Delphi among many other theaters. Her work has been widely translated and performed in the US, Europe and the middle east. Her book Tight Belts and Other Skin (Agra, 2012) received the Ourani Prize of The Greek Academy of Letters and has been translated into Swedish and English. She is a co-author of the screenplay for the 2001 film adaptation of The Only Journey of His Life, about the Greek short-story writer Giorgios Vizyenos, which won the best film award in the Greek State Film Awards. Early life Penga was born in Thessaloniki. She attended college in the United States, earning a bachelor's degree in philosophy and theater at Wesleyan University and a master's degree in scriptwriting at the University of Southern California. She returned to Greece in the early 1990s. Style and themes Penga's work was