Moritz von Stuelpnagel is an American theatre director. Newsday has described him as, "best known for having staged blasphemous hand puppets" in Hand to God,[1] for which he was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Direction of a Play in 2015.
Von Stuelpnagel's parents emigrated from Germany to the United States in 1975.[2] He attended Boston University College of Fine Arts School of Theatre before receiving a Masters in Fine Arts from Rutgers Mason Gross School of the Arts, Theatre Division.[3] [4]
From 2009 to 2015, he served as the Artistic Director of Studio 42, an Off-Off-Broadway theater company whose mission was to produce plays they deemed "unproducible".
Critic Terry Teachout of The Wall Street Journal wrote of Von Stuelpnagel's work, "[His] 2015 Broadway staging of Hand to God proved him to be a master of stage comedy, physical and otherwise."[5] Hand to God garnered five Tony Award nominations in 2015, including Best Direction of a Play.[6] Von Stuelpnagel directed the 2016 production of Hand to God in London's West End at the Vaudeville Theatre where it was nominated for a Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Comedy.[7]
In 2017, he directed a Broadway revival of Noël Coward's Present Laughter starring Kevin Kline, which was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play.
In 2018, von Stuelpnagel directed the premiere on Broadway of Theresa Rebeck's Bernhardt/Hamlet starring Janet McTeer.