Motti Lerner

Motti Lerner was born in 1949 in Zichron Yaakov. He studied mathematics and physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and theater in London and San Francisco. From 1979 to 1984, he was director and playwright at the Khan Theater in Jerusalem. Since then, he has been a freelance playwright and screenwriter for the major theaters and TV channels in Israel, as well as a lecturer in political playwriting at Tel Aviv University. He has also been writer-in-residence at the Center for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies in Oxford, Visiting Drama Professor at Duke University, USA, and frequently lectures at European and American universities on Israeli theater, especially in relation to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Lerner has written many plays and many TV films and drama series. His plays have been produced in the USA, England, Germany, Switzerland, Austria and Australia. He has received many awards including the Israeli Academy Award for Children’s Drama (1980), the Meskin Play of the Year Award (1985), the Prime Minister’s Prize (1994), the Israeli Motion Picture Academy Award for Best TV Drama (1995), the Best TV Feature Film (2004) and the Landau Prize for Cinema and Television (2014).

Photo by: Nicole de Castro