Playwriting: Plays premiered at EST, Playwrights Horizons, Woolly Mammoth, 1812, Wellfleet Harbor, SF Playhouse, published in 6 volumes of Best American Short Plays. Musical theatre: Original concept/additional lyrics for Rent, book for Click Clack Moo. TV: Scripts for Beavis & Butt-head, Courage the Cowardly Dog, Postcards From Buster, Wonder Pets. Big Break: Jen Oxley invites me to team up with her to create Emmy-winning PBS Kids show Peg + Cat and found 100 Chickens Productions! Favorite thing about 100 Chickens: The people. I can’t get over how great everybody is at what they do and how much heart they put into the work.
Originally from Toronto, Alia has
built a gratifying career in animation through a series of chance encounters.
After graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Emily Carr Institute of Art
and Design in Vancouver (where she studied painting, drawing and printmaking),
she needed a job. A production manager she met at a party led her to her first
summer gig at Studio B Productions, cell painting, back when people still
painted on acetate cells. She stayed more than a decade, producing original
Canadian productions such as CTV’s D’Myna Leagues, YTV’s Yvon
of the Yukon and Teletoon’s Class of the Titans and
other series such as Ned’s Newt (for Nelvana) and The
New Woody Woodpecker Show (for Universal Cartoon Studios). New York
City became her new home in 2006, after the project she was working on in
Vancouver moved to New York and she moved with it, to work on Word
World, the Emmy-Award winning series aired on PBS.
Alia is very proud to have worked on Peg + Cat, an empowering show that features a strong girl character, is very funny, well written, and has great music and beautiful designs. In fact, she wishes such a program were around when she was a kid, one that showed math is everywhere and can be fun. She makes her home in Brooklyn, where she cohabits with a strong-willed feline name Zig.