Moisés Kaufman was awarded the 2015 National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama for “his powerful contribution to American Theater.” A Hispanic immigrant, Moisés is a playwright, director, and the founder of Tectonic Theater Project. In recognition of his contributions to the theater and to international conversations about social justice, he has received numerous professional and humanitarian honors including an Obie Award, a Drama Desk Award, a 2002 Guggenheim Fellowship in Playwriting and the 2002 Humanitas Prize. He has also been nominated for the Tony Award for his play 33 Variations and an Emmy Award for his film adaptation of The Laramie Project.
Moisés was born in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1963, moved to New York City in 1987 to complete his education at New York University and shortly after founded Tectonic Theater Project.
For Tectonic Moisés wrote his first play: Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, which ran Off-Broadway for a year and a half. Gross Indecency received the Lucille Lortel Award for Best Play and the Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Off-Broadway Play.
While Gross Indecency was running, Matthew Shepard, a young gay student at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, was killed. Moisés and several members of Tectonic traveled to Laramie to conduct interviews with the people of the town. From these interviews, they wrote the play The Laramie Project. TIME called Laramie “one of the 10 best plays of 2000,” and it was recently selected by the New York Times as one of their “25 Best American Plays Since ‘Angels in America’.” It remains among the most performed plays in the United States each year. In 2002, Moisés co-wrote and directed HBO’s film adaptation of the play which garnered four Emmy Award nominations, including Best Writer and Best Director.
Since then, his writing credits include 33 Variations (which he directed on Broadway with Jane Fonda in 2009), The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later (2008), One Arm (2011), an Afro-Cuban adaptation of the opera Carmen (2013-2016), Las Aventuras de Juan Planchard, a bilingual play about his native Venezuela (2023), and Here There Are Blueberries.
Moisés is also a dedicated teacher. Since 2000, he and Tectonic’s teaching artists have been sharing the company’s techniques in lectures, training labs, and educational residencies. In 2018, he co-wrote Moment Work: Tectonic Theater Project’s Process of Devising Theater (Vintage), a comprehensive introduction to his theatrical principles and the company’s creative tools.
On Broadway, Moisés directed Paradise Square, which garnered 10 Tony Award nominations, the Broadway revival of Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song, the revival of The Heiress with Jessica Chastain, the Tony-nominated 33 Variations with Jane Fonda, Rajiv Joseph’s Pulitzer Prize finalist Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo with Robin Williams, and Doug Wright’s Pulitzer- and Tony Award-winning I Am My Own Wife with Jefferson Mays.
Other directing credits include Here There Are Blueberries, Seven Deadly Sins (Drama Desk Award for Unique Theatrical Experience), One Arm, The Tallest Tree in the Forest with Daniel Beaty, The Nightingale, The Common Pursuit, Macbeth in Central Park with Liev Schreiber, This Is How It Goes at the Donmar Warehouse with Idris Elba, El Gato con Botas, Master Class with Rita Moreno, and Into the Woods. Kaufman is actively developing other new works including Treatment & Data (about the activist group ACT-UP and the fight to find a cure for AIDS), and a solo show co-created and performed by renowned drag queen and performance artist Sasha Velour.
