Paula Vogel
Renowned playwright Paula Vogel will be awarded the Thornton Wilder Prize at the Second International Thornton Wilder Conference on June 13, 2015, at Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island. Ms. Vogel is the fourth recipient of the Wilder Prize (after Russell Banks, Robert MacNeil, and Rocco Landesman), and the first playwright to receive the award.
Paula Vogel’s most recent projects include Don Juan Comes Home From Iraq, a new play that responds to Von Horvath’s searing post World War I play. Along with director Blanka Zizka and company members of the Wilma theatre, Paula Vogel conducted interviews with veterans of the Iraq/Afghanistan wars, and taught a year-long workshop with veterans in Philadelphia. It will be published by TCG in fall 2015. Her recent co-creation collaboration with Rebecca Taichman, Indecent, will open at Yale Repertory and LaJolla Playhouse in the fall of 2015. In addition, Paula Vogel continues her “bootcamps,” playwriting intensives, with theatre companies, organizations, board members, subscribers, and writers across the country.
Paula Vogel’s play, How I Learned to Drive, received the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Lortel Prize, Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle and New York Drama Critics Awards for Best Play, as well as winning her second OBIE. It has been produced all over the world.
Other plays include The Long Christmas Ride Home, The Mineola Twins, The Baltimore Waltz, Hot’N’Throbbing, Desdemona, And Baby Makes Seven, and The Oldest Profession and A Civil War Christmas. In 2004-5 she was the playwright in residence at The Signature Theatre in New York which produced three of her works.
Theatre Communications Group has published four books of her work, The Mammary Plays, The Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays, The Long Christmas Ride Home, and A Civil War Christmas.
Most recent awards include the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Dramatists Guild (2011), and the 2010 William Inge Festival Distinguished Achievement in the American Theatre Award. In January 2013 she was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame. She is most honored to have two awards to emerging playwrights named after her: the Paula Vogel Award, created by the American College Theatre Festival in 2003, and the Paula Vogel Award in Playwriting, given annually by the Vineyard Theatre since 2007.
Ms. Vogel won the 2004 Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the OBIE for Best Play in 1992, the Rhode Island Pell Award in the Arts, the Hull-Warriner Award, The Laura Pels Award, the Pew Charitable Trust Senior Award, a Guggenheim, an AT&T New Plays Award, the Fund for New American Plays, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center Fellowship, several National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, the McKnight Fellowship, and the Bunting Fellowship from Radcliffe College. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was recently awarded a Thirtini, a most coveted award, from 13P in New York. She has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, the Double UCross Colony as well as Yaddo. She is most grateful to have received a residency at the 2013 Sundance Theatre Lab to work on Rehearsing Vengeance with Rebecca Taichman.
She taught for 24 years at Brown University and for five years at the Yale School of Drama where she was the Eugene O’Neill Professor (adjunct) of Playwriting.