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Beata Pozniak

Beata Pozniak is a Polish-American actor whose work moves freely between film, television, theatre, voice performance and visual art. Born in Gdańsk and raised by her mother in Soviet-ruled Poland during the Cold War, she entered the National Film School in Łódź with the highest exam score in the country and earned a Master of Fine Arts degree with High Honors at 22. Her first screen experience had come even earlier, as a high-school extra in The Tin Drum. After graduating, Pozniak moved to Warsaw and appeared in a successful production of Alan Ayckbourn’s How the Other Half Loves. During rehearsals, filmmaker Andrzej Wajda became a mentor and offered guidance for her career. She immigrated to the United States in 1985, later making her American feature debut as Marina Oswald in Oliver Stone’s JFK. It was a role that introduced her to a wider U.S. audience and opened the way to an unusually varied run of screen characters. Pozniak has often been cast as women with authority, conviction or complicated loyalties. She played Earth Alliance President Susanna Luchenko in Babylon 5, scientist Ludmilla in Dark Skies and Dr. Katya Petrova in Melrose Place. Her television work also includes The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, JAG, Mad About You, The Drew Carey Show and Oliver Stone’s Wild Palms. In the interactive movie Psychic Detective, she starred as Laina, while the experimental short All These Voices cast her as a Second World War survivor. Her voice work shows another side of that range. Pozniak has narrated audiobooks including The Winter Palace, Empress of the Night and Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, for which she received a 2019 Earphones Award. Video game audiences may know her as Skarlet in Mortal Kombat 11. Acting is only one part of Pozniak’s creative life. She founded Theater Discordia, has written and directed performance-art pieces, and works as a painter and sculptor. Her short-film directing debut, Mnemosyne, incorporated her own artwork—a fitting overlap for a career that has never stayed inside a single form.