Olga Ciężkowska graduated from the Faculty of Drama Direction at the Academy of Theatre Arts in Kraków. She also studied cultural studies and philosophy as part of Interdisciplinary Individual Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Warsaw. As a student, she carried out directing assistantships for performances by Grzegorz Jarzyna (The Tempest, 2019) and Maja Kleczewska (Face to Face, 2021). She made her debut as co-creator of the collective performance Kto Nie Ma Nic, Ten Może Wszystko (Who Has Nothing, Can Do Everything), based on local stories and herstories, staged at the Nowy Theatre in Łódź. She returned to the Nowy Theatre at the end of 2021, presenting her independent debut – the performance Wszyscy Jesteśmy Dziwni (We Are All Weird) based on Karolina Sulej’s reportage of the same title. For the performance, she received the main prize of the 13th Koszalin Youth Confrontations M-Theatre, as well as an award in the 28th edition of the National Competition for the Exhibition of Polish Contemporary Art. At the time, the jury recognised both the director and playwright of the performance, Anna Mazurek. The artists had previously collaborated, among others, on an online étude, an adaptation of the novel House of Day, House of Night by Olga Tokarczuk.
Ciężkowska also co-created the music for the adaptation of the novel Trash Story by Mateusz Górniak, directed by Jan Kanty Zienko (Teatr Nowy in Łódź, 2022), which was nominated for the Nike Literary Award. In the same year, she transferred Górniak’s text Jesus to the stage of the Wałbrzych Dramatic Theatre and created – together with Adam Dragun – the performative documentary The Last Time My Parents Were at Komuna Warszawa, to which the artists’ parents were invited. In tandem with Dragun, she also produced the project Deadline, a co-production of the theatres P*AKT in Bratislava and Alfred ve dvoře in Prague. She once again reached for prose, staging Lucia Berlin’s short-form works published as A Manual for Cleaning Women (Kochanowski Theatre in Opole, 2024). In the same year, she collaborated with the NOW POLIŻ collective on the performance Lesbian Sunset, inspired by the first unofficial lesbian congress in Poland, which was organised in Mielno in 1987. The creators of the performance then turned to the erased herstories of queer women. The theme of non-normative identity and queer affect also appears in her next work, the play Fearless Love by Eve Adams, inspired by the biography of the Polish-Jewish writer and anarchist activist who founded a club for the lesbian community in New York in the mid-1920s called Eve’s Hangout (premiere 14th December 2024 at the National Old Theatre in Kraków). In an interview with Agata Tomasiewicz published in 2022 in Teatr magazine, she shared her thoughts on the marginalisation of women’s sexuality in popular discourse, adding: ‘as a non-hetero woman I intend to contribute to carving out this stage space for us’.
Ciężkowska has also directed performance readings of dramas – her reading of Daria Kubisiak’s displaced text qualified for the finals of the You'll Never Walk Alone competition organised by TR Warszawa, which was devoted to reproductive rights, particularly the right to abortion. The director was also the co-founder of the Dramaturgy Workshop at AST National Academy of Theatre Arts in Krakow, a think-tank established by a group of employees and students of the school with emphasis on archival, artistic and research activities.
