Laura Leffler

Laura Leffler is a Kansas City-born and raised, Twin Cities-based, theatre director and producer, who also has a passion for writing and performing. She specializes in creating full new works for the stage, scripted and devised, and new play development. Laura grew up closeted in the Midwest and used literature and music as means of escape, and making plays has been her primary art form throughout her life. Due to her book and music obsession, it's not surprising that her artistic work now revolves around new plays, musicals, literary adaptions, and works of theater with music. While new works have been the primary focus of her professional career, she does love adapting the Greeks and she misses working on Shakespeare - they were new plays at one point, right? Typically her original work is themed around queering the canon, sexuality identity, a bucket of water in your underwear, eating live food onstage, the ocean and its multitudes, and staged readings of new plays. She makes large-scale theater performances and revels in the epic. She crafts nuanced, small moments and excels at close acting coaching. She combines clarity with the messiness of works in progress.

Outside of making new plays, you can find Laura cooking at home in North Minneapolis with her two children and spouse. She is a cat person who now owns two dogs, George Knightley and Harriet Smith (hey, Jane Austen). She enjoys going out for ‘bakery-quest’ brunches with the family, camping, gardening, baking, and sewing.

During the theatrical shutdown due to the pandemic, Laura and her wife co-founded The Handy Dyke, a small handy person business. With THD they employed nearly 30 out-of-work theatre practitioners in painting, carpentry, light electrical, and more for residential and commercial clients. It has now sunsetted, but not before being covered on the online lesbian/queer ‘zine Autostraddle. Curve ball, eh?

Laura co-founded and was the Artistic Director of the now sunsetted Savage Umbrella/Umbrella Collective, a collaborative theatre ensemble dedicated to social issues, women, and LGBTQIA+ theatre. She has been the New Work and Producing Associate at History Theatre in downtown St. Paul since April 2022.

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