Laura Shapiro Kramer

Laura Shapiro Kramer (born July 27, 1948) is an American author, producer and film maker.

Early life

Born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts, Shapiro Kramer left New England to attend the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the 1960s. In 1969 she moved to Los Angeles where she attended UCLA studying Film and Art History.

Career

In 1975 Shapiro Kramer began working with Steve Leber and David Krebs. Working with Leber and Krebs, Laura managed the first national tour of Jesus Christ Superstar from 1976 to 1980. In 1979, she married Jay Kramer, an attorney whose clients include Stephen King, Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt.

In 1981 Shapiro Kramer sold David Mamet's first tele-play Smashville to ABC. In 1983 Shapiro Kramer produced John Byrne's Slab Boys on Broadway directed by Robert Allan Ackerman and starring Sean Penn, Kevin Bacon, Val Kilmer and Madeline Potter. Her production won an Outer Critics Circle Award.

Parenting

In 1991 after publishing an article about the Feldenkrais method in Family Circle, Shapiro Kramer was a guest on The Oprah Winfrey Show. In 1995 Shapiro Kramer published the memoir Uncommon Voyage about her experiences parenting a child with special needs.^[1] The book is now in a second edition (2002) and has been in print for 13 years.

Shapiro Kramer was chair of the board of Resources for Children with Special Needs until 2005. She has also been on the board of directors for the New York City Outward Bound Center and the Iyengar Yoga Association of Greater New York where she is Founder and Chair of the Advisory Board. She is an independent consultant for Friends of Bezalel,www.bezalelfriends.org, the National Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem and The Sculptors Guild.

In November 2005 Shapiro Kramer published "Laura and Myriam's Incredible Albanian Vacation" in Illyria, an Albanian/American newspaper from Bardha Publications. The article described her travels to Albania, Kosovo, and the Balkans and the documentary film Shqiperi she was producing with NYFA, the New York Foundation for the Arts where she was the Project Director for The Albyon Project.

References