American playwright and screenwriter Tony Kushner was BOTD in 1956. Born in New York City to a middle-class Jewish family, he was raised in Lake Charles in Louisiana, he returned to New York in 1979 to study medieval literature at Columbia University. He attended the Tisch School of the Arts in 1984, and pursued a career as a playwright. His is best known for his play Angels in America, a two-part, seven hour epic about gay life in Reaganist America at the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Commissioned in 1990 by the Eureka Theatre Company in San Francisco, it premiered at London’s Royal National Theatre in 1991 and 1992, before taking Broadway by storm in 1993. Fierce, funny and expressly queer, the play intercuts the experiences of a young gay man with AIDS receiving visions from a horny angel; a gay Jewish socialist and his married Mormon lover; a pill-popping housewife who hallucinates her way to Antarctica; and closeted gay lawyer Roy Cohn being haunted by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg as he dies from AIDS. Invoking a dizzying array of cultural references including the Torah, the New Testament, the Book of Mormon, The Wizard of Oz, the films of Jean Cocteau and the Joan Crawford biopic Mommie Dearest, the play was hailed as a landmark in American theatre, winning Kushner a Tony Award for best play and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Kushner adapted the play for a much-admired 2003 TV mini-series, directed by Mike Nichols and starring Meryl Streep and Al Pacino. His other theatrical projects include the musical Caroline, or Change, a portrait of a Black woman working for a white family during the 1960s civil rights movement, and the audaciously-titled The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures. In the 2000s, he began a fruitful collaboration with filmmaker Steven Spielberg, writing the screenplays for the political thriller Munich, the Abraham Lincoln biopic Lincoln, and a revisionist remake of the musical West Side Story. He also collaborated on a successful film adaptation of August Wilson’s play Fences. An outspoken critic of the Israeli government’s occupation of Palestine, he has frequently been involved in public debates with Jewish conservatives. Kushner married his long-time partner Mark Harris in 2008, with whom he lives in New York.