Her work offers audiences new and complex perspectives of identity, history, and culture, challenging the perceptions we construct for ourselves and others.With her wife, Anne Sterling, the Nancy Duke Lewis Professor of Biology and Gender Studies at Brown University, Vogel lives in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. In recognition of her contributions to the future of playwriting, several awards for young playwrights have been named in her honor, including the Paula Vogel Award, granted by the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival, and the Paula Vogel Award in Playwriting, given by the Vineyard Theatre. She is known for breaking ground in a field largely dominated by men, and for her unflinching explorations of issues such as domestic violence and the AIDS crisis. In 1984 she joined the faculty of Brown University, where she was the founding director of the master of fine arts program in playwriting and the Adele Kellenberg Seaver Professor in Creative Writing until 2008. Paula was playwright in residence at The Signature Theatre (2004-05 season), and Theatre Communications Group publishes six volumes of her work. It continues to this day, sponsored by the Pembroke Center for Women at Brown University. From 2008-2012, she was the O’Neill Chair at Yale School of Drama.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.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 and the Donmar Theatre have produced her work in England.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 Colony, and the Bunting. Named after Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, teacher, and longtime Vineyard artist Paula Vogel, the award includes a stipend, work space, dramaturgical support, and collaborative resources to develop a new work or works at The Vineyard over the course of a season.
New Dramatists; 424 West 44th Street, New York, NY 10036; Contact Us Paula continues her playwriting intensives with community organizations, students, theater companies, subscribers and writers across the globe. During that time she also started a theater workshop for women in maximum-security detention at the Adults Correctional Institute in Cranston, Rhode Island. She attended Bryn Mawr College from 1969 to 1970 and 1971 to 1972, and is a graduate of The Catholic University of America (BA, 1974) and Cornell University (MA, 1976; PhD, 2016). She is 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, 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.