Moisés Kaufman (born November 21, 1963) is a Venezuelan American theater director , filmmaker, playwright , founder of Tectonic Theater Project based in New York City, and co-founder of Miami New Drama at the Colony Theatre . He was awarded the 2016 National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama . He is best known for creating The Laramie Project (2000) with other members of Tectonic Theater Project . He has directed extensively on Broadway and Internationally, and is the author of numerous plays, including Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde and 33 Variations .
3-688: Born and raised in Caracas , Venezuela , he moved as a young man to New York City in 1987. Kaufman is of Romanian-Jewish and Ukrainian-Jewish descent, and was born in Caracas, Venezuela . He is an alumnus of Venezuela's Universidad Metropolitana , where he began to study theatre. After immigrating to the United States, he went to college in New York and graduated from NYU . In 2005 he described himself in an interview by saying, "I am Venezuelan, I am Jewish, I am gay , I live in New York. I am
6-559: The 2004 production of I Am My Own Wife by Doug Wright , for which he received a Tony Award nomination for Best Direction of a Play. On September 22, 2016, Kaufman was awarded the National Medal of Arts and Humanities in a ceremony conducted by U.S. president Barack Obama . He is the first Venezuelan to receive the honor. In 2022, Kaufman was included in the book 50 Key Figures in Queer US Theatre , profiled in
9-424: The sum of all my cultures. I couldn't write anything that didn't incorporate all that I am." Kaufman was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002, following the premiere of The Laramie Project , which was based on extensive interviews with residents and commentators in and around Wyoming who were involved with the aftermath of the murder of gay student Matthew Shepard . He made his Broadway directing debut in
#85914