Murray Mednick is the founder of the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival and Workshop, where he served as Artistic Director from 1978 through 1995. Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1939, 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 of two Rockefeller Foundation grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an OBIE, several Bay Area Critics Awards, a 1992 Ovation Lifetime Achievement Award from Theatre LA for outstanding contributions to Los Angeles theater. Mednick was awarded the 2002 Margaret Harford Award for Sustained Excellence in Theater by the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle, and a lifetime achievement award from L.A. Weekly.