The Laramie Project, by Moisés Kaufman and members of Tectonic Theater Project, premiered at The Ricketson Theatre in February 2002 with the Denver Center Theatre Company and was then performed at the Union Square Theatre in New York City before a November 2002 performance in Laramie, Wyoming. The play was created by a group of theater artists who traveled to Laramie after the murder of Matthew Shepard in 1998 and drew on hundreds of interviews conducted with residents of the town, company members’ own journal entries and published news reports to tell the story. In 2008, Tectonic Theater Project went back to Laramie and developed The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later. 

Leigh Fondakowski is the head writer of The Laramie Project, a member of Tectonic Theatre Project, an Emmy-nominated co-screenwriter for HBO’s adaptation of The Laramie Project and a co-writer of The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later. Her play The People’s Temple was performed under her direction at the Guthrie Theater, American Theater Company and Berkeley Repertory Theatre. She is a 2007 recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts/Theatre Communications Group Theatre Residency Program for Playwrights and a 2009 MacDowell Colony fellow. She was an Imagine Fund fellow and guest lecturer in 2010 at the University of Minnesota where she completed her play, Casa Cushman, about the 19th-century American actress Charlotte Cushman.