PAULA VOGEL is a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright whose plays include MOTHER PLAY (Tony nomination for Best Play), INDECENT (Tony nomination for Best Play), HOW I LEARNED TO DRIVE (Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Tony nomination, the Lortel Prize, OBIE Award, Drama Desk Award, Outer Critics Circle and New York Drama Critics Awards for Best Play), THE LONG CHRISTMAS RIDE HOME, THE MINEOLA TWINS, THE BALTIMORE WALTZ, HOT’N’THROBBING, DESDEMONA, AND BABY MAKES SEVEN, THE OLDEST PROFESSION and A CIVIL WAR CHRISTMAS.
Paula was playwright in residence at The Signature Theatre (2004-05 season). Her plays have been produced by Second Stage, New York Theatre Workshop, the Vineyard Theatre, Roundabout, and Circle Repertory Company, Center Stage, Intiman, Trinity Repertory, Woolly Mammoth, Huntington Theatre, Magic Theatre, The Goodman Theatre, American Repertory Theatre, Dallas Theatre Berkeley Repertory, and Alley Theatres to name a few. Harrogate Theatre, the Menier Chocolate Factory, and the Donmar Theatre have produced her work in England.
Internationally, he plays have been produced in in English in Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand and in translation in Italy, Germany, Taiwan, South Africa, Australia, Romania, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Poland Slovenia, Canada, Portugal, France, Greece, Japanese, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Peru, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Brazil and many other countries.
In June 2020, she founded Paula Vogel’s Bard at the Gate, a uniquely curated virtual reading series designed to become a widely accessible platform for powerful, overlooked plays by BIPOC, female, LGBTQIA+, and disabled artists.
John Simon once remarked that Paula Vogel had more awards than a “black sofa collects lint.” Honors include induction in the American Theatre Hall of Fame, the Dramatists Guild Lifetime Achievement Award, the Lily Award, the Thornton Wilder Prize, the Obie Award for Lifetime Achievement, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, the William Inge Award, the Elliott Norton Award, a Susan Smith Blackburn Award, the PEN/Laura Pels Award, a TCG Residency Award, a Guggenheim, a Pew Charitable Trust Award, and fellowships and residencies at Sundance Theatre Lab, Hedgebrook, The Rockefeller Center’s Bellagio Center, Yaddo, MacDowell, and the Bunting.
She is particularly proud of her Thirtini Award from 13P, and honored by Awards in her name: the Paula Vogel Award for playwrights given by The Vineyard Theatre, and the Paula Vogel Award given by the American College Theatre Festival.
Paula continues her playwriting intensives with community organizations, students, theater companies, and writers across the globe. She was the 2019 inaugural UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television Hearst Theater Lab Initiative Distinguished Playwright-in-Residence and has recently taught at Sewanee, Shanghai Theatre Academy and Nanjing University, University of Texas at Austin, University of Texas at El Paso, and the Playwrights Center in Minneapolis. From 1984 to 2008, Paula Vogel founded and ran the playwriting program at Brown University; during that time she started a theatre workshop for women in Maximum Security at the Adults Correction Institute in Cranston, Rhode Island. From 2008-2012, she was the O’Neill Chair at Yale School of Drama.
Her plays are published in six volumes by TCG Press and her memoir will be published by Penguin Press. She teaches playwriting workshops throughout the United States and abroad.
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