Author Information

Moises Kaufman was born on November 21, 1963 in Caracas, Venezuela. He is a play writer, as well as being the director, and founder of the Tectonic Theater Project. He moved to New York City at age 24. He is Romanian and Ukrainian, and he practices Judaism. He is the author of The Laramie Project about the tragedy of Matthew Shepard’s horrific beating, due to his sexuality. The play was published in 2001 and became a film on HBO and at the Sundance Film Festival in 2002. He is a very well known, award winning playwright, whose been nominated for Tony’s and Emmy’s and won a Tony award for his play I Am My Own Wife. He attended New York University’s Tisch School of Performing Arts for Drama. The response to the play was huge, people sent the Tectonic Theater Company lots of supportive letters, and it has been performed nation wide from professional theater companies and high schools and colleges. Kaufman wrote this play based off of hundreds of interviews from the citizens of Laramie and friends and family of Matthew Shepard. He calls it “moment work” which is a method he created to analyze theater from a structural perspective. This play is filled with moments instead of scenes, no scene changes, only time with different units to show the meaning of the story.

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