Trained as a playwright at the Yale School of Drama, Gordon earned an MFA in 1986 and went on to work with major Hollywood studios.

He has written for third parties and sold scripts to Universal Pictures, Warner Brothers, MGM and ITC. Working in independent cinema, Gordon wrote and sold projects to New York indie producer Norman Twain. Gordon’s first indie screenplay, Girls Who Smoke, was submitted in 2011. It went on to be officially selected at more than a dozen film festivals, eventually winning the Audience Award in Seattle at the Post Alley Film Festival.

As a playwright, from 2009 to 2013, Gordon worked with dozens of women from New York’s Lower East Side who wanted to tell their personal stories on stage. The resulting series of monologues is entitled In The Red Room/Every Woman Dances For Someone. In May 2019, the fully dramatized version, Girls Who Walked On Glass, was performed in Buffalo to a packed house and rave reviews, and is due to transfer to New York in 2020.

His other plays have been performed in San Francisco, at the Alleyway Theatre, at the Yale School of Drama and at Primary Stages in New York. He is the author of The Power of the Playwright’s Vision, published by Heinemann Press in 2001. This book has been translated worldwide and has become a standard playwriting text in colleges and universities in North America, Europe and Asia.