Founder Profiles
Christopher Kikis | Thoma Kikis | Nicholas Levis | Cherise Wolas | Alan Zelenetz
Alan Zelenetz 
Mr. Zelenetz possesses twenty-five years of professional experience in leadership positions in education, edutainment, and the arts and extensive creative involvement in the world of popular culture. As a freelance writer at Marvel Comics in New York, he scripted The Mighty Thor, Conan the Barbarian, Kull the Conqueror, Master of Kung Fu, and Moon Knight and co-created The Alien Legion, which was licensed in November 2002 by Mainframe Entertainment for animated television. He is also author of four science fiction and fantasy graphic novels and The Handbook of the Conan Universe. A screenplay, Make Mine Mozart, co-written with Reuben Davis, was a finalist in the 1993 America's Best Screenplays competition and optioned by ASP Films for production in Europe. Mr. Zelenetz also served as a script consultant to the successful independent film Pi. His latest publication on the Irish poet and patriot Patrick Pearse is scheduled to appear in the Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloqium in fall 2006. He was also founding associate editor of Envoi: A Review Journal of Medieval Literature and is a former managing editor and literary critic for The Recorder, the Journal of the American Irish Historical Society.
His extensive professional involvement in the world of popular culture and the performing arts also includes studying playwriting and directing with Curt Dempster and Stuart Spencer of the Ensemble Studio Theater and piano performance with Shirley Cohen of the external faculty of SUNY, Purchase.
Mr. Zelenetz has chaired the Administrative Leadership Group of the Lincoln Center Institute for the Arts in Education. He has developed arts education materials in such diverse areas as Shakespeare, Merce Cunningham dance theater, improvisational comedy, German cabaret, and electronic music for the Institute, as well as curriculum materials for the New Jersey Performing Arts Council, the Mid-Manhattan Performing Arts Foundation, the BBC, Verizon, and Carnegie Hall Education.
Prior to co-founding Ovie, he served as Director of Curriculum Development for Teachers College Innovations and Associate Director of the Center for Social Imagination, the Arts, and Education, both at Teachers College, Columbia University. He also served as academic and creative director of the Millennium School Project, which designed in blueprint a model 21st century high school. The project was awarded a ten million dollar challenge grant and has served as a working model for several new schools in the greater Metropolitan area. Mr. Zelenetz graduated Brooklyn College and held a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, Regents Fellowship, and President's Fellowship at Columbia University where he earned an M.A., summa cum laude, and an M.Phil., magna cum laude, in English and Comparative Literature. He is currently completing a doctorate at Columbia and also holds a rabbinic ordination degree.
