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About

Donald Margulies ’76

Playwright whose play Dinner with Friends earned Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Award-winning playwright Donald Margulies ’76 (visual art) attended Purchase to earn his BFA in visual art. While studying here, he discovered his love for drama.

“I ended up transferring to SUNY Purchase, where I continued to be an art major but where I pursued my curiosity about playwriting, with Julius Novick, who became my first champion in the theatre,” he says in a recent interview.

Novick had been a theatre critic for the Village Voice and is
 Professor Emeritus of Literature and Drama Studies here at Purchase. 

Margulies works Sight Unseen and Collected Stories were finalists for Pulitzer Prizes in 1992 and 1997, but he finally earned the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2000 with the critically acclaimed Dinner with Friends.

Margulies is an alumnus of New Dramatists and serves on the council of the Dramatists Guild of America. He’s received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship. He currently teaches in the English department at Yale.