Oren Safdie

Oren Safdie, a nationally celebrated playwright of contemporary architecture culture, will present a read-through of his new play entitled “Color Blind.” This play satirizes the racial politics of a fictional jury assembled to select a winning design for the Smithsonian’s recently built National Museum of African American Museum of History and Culture in Washington DC.

Oren Safdie is a Canadian-American-Israeli playwright, screenwriter, and the son of modernist architect Moshe Safdie. He attended Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture and Planning before changing careers in his last year of architecture school to write plays. He has produced a series of tomes on architecture culture, including his debut work “Private Jokes, Public Places,” the critical off-Broadway hit praised in venues such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.  Other architectural themed plays include “The Bilbao Effect,” which premiered at New York’s Center for Architecture in May 2010, and “False Solution,” which premiered in 2013. He has been a contributor to a long list of journals, including Metropolis, Dwell, and The New Republic. Safdie is also the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships including the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the John Golden Fund and the Société de développement des entreprises culturelles.