Oren Safdie
| Oren Safdie | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
April 20, 1965 Montreal, Quebec |
| Occupation | Playwright |
| Nationality | Canadian |
| Period | 1990s-present |
| Spouse | M. J. Kang |
Oren Safdie (born April 20, 1965) is a Canadian-American-Israeli playwright and screenwriter, and the son of architect Moshe Safdie.
Oren Safdie originally planned to become an architect like his father Moshe Safdie. He obtained a master of architecture degree, attending the Graduate School of Architecture at Columbia University in New York. This was an attempt, he explained, "to get closer to my dad." During his final semester there, he took an elective playwriting course and was hooked on it after winning a competition run by the Columbia Dramatists. He wrote a 10-minute scene, drawing on his experience at Columbia presenting a design to a jury of critics, which involved three ego-driven architects and one student. This eventually became Private Jokes. He stayed another four years at Columbia and completed an MFA in Fiction Writing. Safdie was awarded a Woolrich Fellowship, and founded The West End Gate Theatre, a student theater company that included actors like Oscar nominee Ethan Hawke and The Whole Nine Yards actress Amanda Peet. He became a playwright-in-residence at La MaMa back in 1996, and he produced the first ever Canadian Theatre Festival in New York.
He also spent a year at Iowa State University where he taught architecture and studied with Jane Smiley.
Beginning in 2007, he held the position of Interim Artistic Director of the Malibu Stage Company (now the Malibu Playhouse).
Safdie teaches playwriting and play analysis at the University of Miami and also advises the Astonishing Idiots, a new student-run theater company, housed under the Department of Theatre Arts.
He resides in Los Angeles with his wife, actress and playwright M. J. Kang, and their daughter born in 2008. He commutes to Miami every week and returns home for the weekends.
Safdie wrote the 1998 film You Can Thank Me Later, based on his play Hyper-Allergenic. It stars Ellen Burstyn, Amanda Plummer, Ted Levine, Mark Blum, Mary McDonnell and Geneviève Bujold. It won the Grand Jury Prize at the Newport Film Festival. It subsequently premiered on Showtime in the United States.
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