Laura’s plays include Carla Cooks The War (winner of the $10,000 A.D.A.A. Saroyan/Paul Human Rights Playwriting Award), Abandoned in Queens, Beyond Words (EST/Alfred P. Sloan Commission), and Paradise (IRNE Award Best New Play, Elliott Norton Nomination Outstanding New Script, EST/Alfred P. Sloan Commission). Paradise made its sold-out West Coast premiere in L.A. at The Odyssey Theatre after receiving its world premiere at Underground Railroad/Central Square Theater in Cambridge, and she has written the screenplay version for Vicangelo Films and JuVee Productions. A recipient of three grants in Playwriting and Screenwriting from the New York Foundation for the Arts (including The Geri Ashur Award for her screenplay Truly Mary), she also holds two Daytime Emmy Awards for writing in serial television. Other plays and musicals have been developed or produced at the O’Neill Playwrights Conference, Philadelphia Festival Theatre for New Plays, the Women’s Project and Productions, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Portland Stage, the New Harmony Project, Gulfshore Playhouse, The Working Theatre, Luna Stage, Passage Theatre and Urban Stages, among others. She directs the Ensemble Studio Theatre Playwrights Unit and is part-time Assistant Professor of Playwriting at the New School’s School of Drama for which she received the Distinguished University Wide Teaching Award. She is a graduate of Yale College where she studied with Wole Soyinka, Nikos Psacharopoulos, Michael Roemer, Anthony Davis and Henry Louis Gates, and is a proud member of the WGAE, the Dramatists Guild, and HONOR ROLL! an action and advocacy group of women+ playwrights over 40.