MJ Kaufman is a playwright and television writer from Portland, OR/Multnomah Territory who currently lives in New York City/Lenapehoking. Their plays have been seen at The Public Theater, WP Theater, National Asian American Theater Company, Clubbed Thumb, Colt Coeur, Williamstown Theater Festival, InterAct Theater, Yale School of Drama, and numerous other theaters and schools around the country, as well as in Russian in Moscow and in Australia. Their work has been developed by the Lark Play Development Center, the Playwrights Realm, Page73, and New York Theater Workshop, among others.
MJ received a 2022 grant from The NYC Women’s Fund for Media, Music and Theatre. They have also received a Helen Merrill Emerging Writers Award, an ASCAP Cole Porter Prize in Playwriting, the Global Age Project Prize, and the Jane Chambers Prize in Feminist Theatre. MJ has held residencies at the New Museum, MacDowell Colony, and SPACE on Ryder Farm and is currently a resident playwright at New Dramatists.
MJ has been a member of The Public Theater’s Emerging Writers’ Group, WP Theater Lab, a core playwright at InterAct Theatre, and a playwriting fellow at the Huntington Theatre. An alum of Wesleyan University and Yale School of Drama, MJ has taught playwriting at Yale College, Fordham University, Wesleyan University, SUNY Purchase College, and University of the Arts. They are currently an Assistant Professor of Dramatic Writing at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.
MJ curated the 2016 and 2017 seasons of Trans Theater Fest at The Brick and, along with Kit Yan and Cece Suazo, founded the Trans Lab Fellowship, a program supporting emerging transgender theater artists that ran from 2018 to 2022. They are currently on the board and part of the core community of Breaking the Binary Theatre.
MJ’s short film THERAPIST CRUSH won the Audience Choice Best Film Award at the TRANSlations Film Festival. MJ has also written for Netflix and recently completed the Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellowship at the Center for Fiction. They are currently at work on a novel.