Kristoffer Diaz

Kristoffer Diaz

Kristoffer Diaz is a playwright, librettist, screenwriter, and educator. His play The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama. His adaptation of the Disney film Hercules premiered in Central Park in Summer 2019 as part of the Joseph Papp Public Theater’s Public Works program with a cast of nearly 200. Other full-length titles include Welcome to Arroyo’s, Reggie Hoops, and...
Kristoffer Diaz is a playwright, librettist, screenwriter, and educator. His play The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama. His adaptation of the Disney film Hercules premiered in Central Park in Summer 2019 as part of the Joseph Papp Public Theater’s Public Works program with a cast of nearly 200. Other full-length titles include Welcome to Arroyo’s, Reggie Hoops, and The Unfortunates.

His work has been produced, commissioned, and developed at The Public Theater, Dallas Theater Center, Geffen Playhouse, ACT, Center Theatre Group, The Goodman, Second Stage, Victory Gardens, and Oregon Shakespeare Festival, among many others. Awards include the Guggenheim, Jerome, Van Lier, NYFA, and Gail Merrifield Papp Fellowships; New York Times Outstanding Playwright Award; Lucille Lortel, Equity Jeff, and OBIE Awards; and the Future Aesthetics Artist Regrant, among others.

As a screenwriter, Kristoffer has developed original television pilots for HBO and FX, written for the first season of Netflix's GLOW, and adapted the musical Rent for FOX.

Kristoffer holds a BA from New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, an MFA from NYU’s Department of Dramatic Writing, and an MFA from Brooklyn College’s Performing Arts Management program. He teaches playwriting at New York University. He is an alumnus of New Dramatists and a member of its Board of Directors, a member of the Dramatists Guild Council, and a member of the Writer’s Guild of America, East.

Plays

  • Things With Friends
    Burt and Adele are hosting a dinner party. Their friends are kind of awful. The city is collapsing around them. The steak, however, is fantastic, and the sweet potatoes are on their way. A dark riff on the "sitting on fancy couches drinking expensive wine and eventually revealing deeply hidden secrets" genre of drama.
  • Swag (or Fucking Vigwan)
    This is a horrible play about horrible people. No one should read this play. No one should perform it. This play contains drugs and violence and deviant sexual activities and bad language and bad popular music. There is a child in this play. There is also a zombie body part. Also: the bad guys win. Also: they're all basically bad guys. DO NOT READ THIS PLAY.
  • #therevolution
    Sometimes life is too much to take. Sometimes that makes you do dumb things. Sometimes that dumb thing is killing someone. Sometimes when you kill someone, an army rises up in your name. Then you’ve got to deal with that. #therevolution is an extra dark comedy about two young women who accidentally take over the world and devote themselves to fixing it. Or just enjoying the fame. Either of those.