ROBERT HARDERS has authored numerous plays, teleplays, and film scripts including the sequel to Robert Altman's Nashville and the film Home Movies, directed by Brian de Palma.

Harders wrote, produced, and directed the short film, The Last Laugh, a comedy in a mortuary with Grace Zabriskie, LaTanya Richardson, and Philip Baker Hall, which was selected for the International Critics' Week section of the Cannes Film Festival and invited to dozens of film festivals in the United States and abroad. including, proudly, the inaugural Slamdance Festival. The Last Laugh has been sold throughout Europe and Asia and appeared in the United States on the PBS series "The Short List" as part of the Kodak Emerging Filmmakers Program.

Harders received a Los Angeles Critics Circle nomination for best director for his direction of the play Secret Honor and an Associate Director's credit for his collaboration with Robert Altman on the film version of the play production. He has directed numerous other stage productions including Secret Honor with Philip Baker Hall at the Los Angeles Actors Theatre, the Provincetown Playhouse in NYC, the Next Move Theatre in Boston, and the Mendelssohn Theatre in Ann Arbor, Michigan; and Help Wanted by Franz Xaver Kroetz at the Los Angeles Theatre Center.

ROBERT HARDERS' plays have been seen at the Los Angeles Actors' Theatre, the Los Angeles Theatre Center, Playwrights' Arena, the Pasadena Playhouse, the California Institute of the Arts, the Los Angeles Temporary Contemporary Museum, the Audrey Skirball-Kenis Theatre Project (ASK), the Los Angeles Community College, the Odyssey Theatre, the Skylight Theatre, the Hudson Theatre, the Cast Theatre, the McCadden Place Theatre, the Wooden-O Theatre, Theatre GEO, Theatre of NOTE, and the Edinburgh International Festival.

Harders was a member of the Los Angeles Actors Theatre Playwrights Group, which he also ran for two years. As an Associate Director/Playwright-in-Residenceof the Los Angeles Theatre Center, he initiated and ran the Young Playwrights Lab cosponsored by the Los Angeles Theatre Center and the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts. The Young Playwrights Lab produced one finalist and one semi-finalist in the national, Dramatist Guild-sponsored Young Playwrights’ Festival. Additionally, Harders has taught at the University of Redlands, Cal State Long Beach, and within the Los Angeles Unified School District.

As an actor, Harders has appeared at the Manhattan Theatre Club (Frankie and Annie), the Williamstown Summer Theatre (Cyrano, Mother Courage, Plaza Suite), the New York Shakespeare Festival (Pericles), the Truck and Warehouse Theatre (premier of Aurora, by Irene Fornes, directed by the playwright), the Wonderhorse Theatre (All the Way Home), the Cherry Lane Theatre (Sexual Perversity in Chicago, understudy), and was a member of the London company of the James Joyce Memorial Liquid Theatre.

Harders received an MFA in Theatre from Sarah Lawrence College under Wilford Leach.