Murray Mednick is thefounder of the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival and Workshop, where he servedas Artistic Director from 1978 through 1995. Born in Brooklyn, New York in1939, he was for many years a playwright-in-residence at New York's Theatre Genesis,a seminal group in the development of Off-Off Broadway. He is the recipient oftwo Rockefeller Foundation grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an OBIE, severalBay Area Critics Awards, a 1992 Ovation Lifetime Achievement Award from TheatreLA for outstanding contributions to Los Angeles theater. Mednick was awardedthe 2002 Margaret Harford Award for Sustained Excellence in Theater by the LosAngeles Drama Critics Circle, and a lifetime achievement award from L.A.Weekly.