Writers // Greg Pierotti

Greg Pierotti is an award winning story writer for both the screen and the stage.  He is co-writer of the teleplay The Laramie Project, which was produced by Good Machine and HBO, and which won the Humanitas Prize and garnered an Emmy nomination for outstanding writing for a movie. He was an associate writer of the play The Laramie Project from which the screenplay was adapted.  The play received the Bay Area Critic’s Circle Award for outstanding achievement in the theater and garnered nominations for both a NY Drama Desk Award for best play and a GLAAD media award.  For two years running The Laramie Project was the second most produced play in America, it continues to be one of the most produced plays in the country. 

He is the head writer of the play The People’s Temple, which retells the story of the rise of Jim Jones’s notorious religious and political organization in California from the members’ perspectives.  For The People’s Temple , he received the Will Glickman Playwright Award for best world premier of a play. 

He is co-writer of The Laramie Project 10 Years Later, which he also performed in the fall of 2009 at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall.  The play was performed the same day in 150 theaters in all fifty states and around the world from Hong Kong to Melbourne to Tel Aviv.  Mr. Pierotti’s work on Laramie Project Ten Years Later drew particular notice this fall because of his dramatic rendering of the prison visits he made to Aaron McKinney, the main perpetrator of Matthew Shepard’s murder.  Mr. McKinney had only granted one media interview until his ten hours of talks with Mr. Pierotti.  In those talks he confided new information to Mr. Pierotti about the murder and his motivation.  This work drew the attention of the gay activist community and of the media beyond the arts and entertainment columns. A national tour is being planned for the fall of 2010.  Mr. Pierotti will perform in the tour and write a series of weekly columns for The Advocate magazine as the tour moves across the country. 

Mr. Pierotti has developed his own work and  other’s work at The Sundance Theater Lab, New York Theater Workshop, The Magic, Perseverance, Denver Center, and the NYTW summer program at Dartmouth. Most recently his short story ‘lude, was selected by Don Rice to be anthologized in his upcoming Men to Men: New Voices in Gay Fiction.

Mr. Pierotti’s particular are of interest is the counter cultures of New York in the 1970s and 1980s, including the punk rock and drug cultures of the seventies, the down town arts and club scene of the early eighties, and sexual and activist queer cultures both pre and post AIDS.

Mr. Pierotti has guest lectured and taught writing and performance in colleges and theater companies around the country.  He has taught Master Classes in play development in the MFA programs at Naropa University and the University of Maryland.  As an actor he originated roles in the world premiers The Laramie Project, The Laramie Project: 10 years later, The People’s Temple, and Gross Indecency: the Three Trials of Oscar Wilde. He has been seen in new work on such stages as The Minetta Lane, The Union Square, The Atlantic, Primary Stages, Arena Stage, The Guthrie, Berkeley Rep, LoJolla Playhouse, Hartford Stage, The Denver Center.