Gabrielė Labanauskaitė

Gabrielė Labanauskaitė (Lithuania, 1980) is a poet, prose writer, playwright and book critic, who share some of her plays at personal website www.galdrama.lt. Gabriele has written a PhD about the narrative construction of stage plays and teaches history and theory of playwriting at the Lithuanian Music and Theatre Academy in Vilnius. She had courses and training in Finland, Greece, Italy, USA and UK.

In 2003 Gabriele started writing stage plays, of which "The One that Hurts the Most", "Circus" and "Red Laces" won awards at the National Lithuanian Plays contest and were represented in Finland, Sweden, UK and Russia.

Departing from the more traditional delivery of poetry, Gabriele uses song and spoken word as a vehicle for her poetry. In 2004 she produced the multimedia CD "Apelsinai aikštėj apgriuvusioj" ("Oranges on a Wretched Square") followed in 2009 by the poetry/music/video collaboration Avaspo (Audiovisual Asp of Poetry) releasing its three poetry cd/dvd albums. All poetic trilogy can be found at www.avaspo.lt.

Since 2006 Gabriele organizes the annual festival "Tarpfest" ("In-between Festival"), Lithuania's only audiovisual poetry festival. The festival takes place in Vilnius every October.