Paula Vogel

Playwright. How I Learned to Drive (premiered in 1997) garnered the Pulitzer Prize (1998), Lortel, Drama Desk, the Obie, and the New York Drama Critics Award for Best Play. Work was selected for the 2004-2005 season of the Signature Theatre. Attended Bryn Mawr College, Catholic University of America, and Cornell University.

From 1979 to 1982, she was a lecturer in Women's Studies and Theater Arts at Cornell; she was fired in 1982 for political reasons. Leaving Cornell gave her time to work on theater projects including guest lectureships at McGill University and University of Alaska. In 1984, she took a position as the director of the graduate playwriting program at Brown University, where she stayed until the fame she earned from How I Learned to Drive allowed her the financial independence to leave in 1997. Throughout her playwriting career she has been associated with numerous programs, including Theatre With Teeth in New York, Theater Eleanor Roosevelt in Providence, and Perseverance Theater in Juneau.

Her plays imaginatively make sense of subjects that mainstream society finds taboo. And Baby Makes Seven, for instance, deals with a same-sex couple using the occasion of their impending childbirth to clear out the imaginary children that they already have. The Baltimore Waltz features a woman touring Europe with her brother, seeking a cure for the fictitious Acquired Toilet Disease, or ATD. Vogel wrote this play soon after watching her brother Carl die of AIDS. The play uses the prejudices and misconceptions about the imaginary disease to highlight societal attitudes about AIDS and its victims.

Vogel is only the tenth woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for playwrighting and the first openly gay woman to do so.