MJ Kaufman
MJ Kaufman is a playwright living in Brooklyn. They currently serve as Area Head of Playwriting at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. They also write films, TV, and fiction.
In 2022, I was lucky enough to meet Emma Horwitz and Bailey Williams in New Georges’ Audrey Residency program, where they were developing Two Sisters Find a Box of Lesbian Erotica in the Woods. They brought in archival lesbian erotica and invited us all to investigate the form. Last January, I saw them perform their play, a deliciously spicy flurry of queer archetypes, worlds, and motifs, digging ever deeper into their intimacy as writers, artists, and partners.
When George Strus and I sat down in the spring of 2022 to talk about their vision for Breaking the Binary—a theater festival composed of work by and for trans, nonbinary, and two-spirit artists, in which all artists would be paid a living wage—I thought I was dreaming. Here was the vision I’d been waiting for, that our community desperately needed—and a creative producer with exactly the drive, heart, thoughtfulness, and humility to make it happen.
