| Moisés Kaufman | |
|---|---|
| Born | November 21 1963 Caracas, Venezuela |
| Occupation | playwright, theatre director |
| Nationality |  Venezuelan |
Moisés Kaufman (born November 21 1963) is a playwright and director. He wrote The Laramie Project with other members of the Tectonic Theater Project. He was born and raised in Caracas, Venezuela and moved to New York City in 1987. He has also written Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde. His Jewish father survived the Holocaust and fled from Romania to Venezuela where he met Kaufman's Venezuelan-born mother. Kaufman's maternal grandparents were European Jews who immigrated before the war.[1] Kaufman's Orthodox Jewish parents sent him to the yeshiva, a school that provided both religious and academic instruction. Although Kaufman would eventually cease to practice Orthodox Judaism, he valued its lessons on Talmudic scholarship, especially "tak[ing] a sentence from the Bible and analys[ing] it twenty different ways." He made his Broadway directing debut in 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.
