Gordon Farrell

GORDON FARRELL trained as a playwright at the Yale School of Drama, receiving an MFA in 1986 and going on to work with major Hollywood studios, initially as a story analyst for Warner Brothers and Columbia Pictures, and eventually as a screenwriter. He has written for hire and sold screenplays to Universal Pictures, Warner Brothers, MGM, and ITC. Farrell’s first independent screenplay, Girls Who Smoke, premiered in 2011. It went on to be an official selection at more than a dozen film festivals, receiving the Audience Choice Award at Seattle’s Post Alley Film Festival. As a playwright, from 2009 to 2013, Gordon worked with dozens of women on New York’s Lower East Side who wanted to tell their personal stories on stage. The series of monologue plays that grew out of it was called In the Red Room/Every Woman Dances for Someone. His other plays have been produced in San Francisco, and at Alleyway Theatre, the Yale School of Drama, and New York’s Primary Stages. He is the author of The Power of the Playwright’s Vision, published by Heinemann Press in 2001. It has been translated internationally and become a standard playwriting text at colleges and universities in North America, Europe, and Asia.