Dorfman was born in Buenos Aires on May 6, 1942, the son of Adolf Dorfman, who was born in Odessa, a prominent Argentine professor of economics and the author of Historia de la Industria Argentina, and Fanny Zelicovich Dorfman, whose roots were Romanian-Moldavian. Shortly after his birth, they moved to the United States and then, in 1954, moved to Chile. He attended and later worked as a professor at the University of Chile, becoming a Chilean citizen in 1967. From 1968 to 1969, he attended graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley and then returned to Chile.

His thesis on the absurd in plays of Harold Pinter was published in Spanish as El absurdo entre cuatro paredes: el teatro de Harold Pinter by Editorial Universitaria, in Santiago, Chile, in 1968 (124 pages). Pinter later became a personal friend as well as an influence on Dorfman's work and political thinking.

Since the restoration of democracy in Chile, in 1990, he has divided his time between Santiago and the United States.

From 1970 to 1973, Dorfman served as a cultural advisor to president Salvador Allende. During this time he wrote, with Armand Mattelart, a legendary critique of North American cultural imperialism, How to Read Donald Duck. Forced to leave Chile in 1973, after the coup by General Augusto Pinochet leading to the death of President Salvador Allende, he subsequently lived in Paris, Amsterdam, and Washington, D.C. Since 1985 he has taught at Duke University, where he is currently Walter Hines Page Research Professor of Literature and Professor of Latin American Studies. Dorfman details his life of exile and bi-cultural living in his memoir, Heading South, Looking North, which has been acclaimed by Elie Wiesel, Nadine Gordimer, Thomas Keneally and others.

Dorfman's work often deals with the horrors of tyranny and, in later works, the trials of exile. His most famous play, Death and the Maiden, describes the encounter of a former torture victim with the man she believed tortured her; it was made into a film in 1994 by Roman Polanski starring Sigourney Weaver and Ben Kingsley.

A critic of Pinochet, he has written extensively about the General's extradition case for the Spanish newspaper El País and other publications, and in the book Exorcising Terror: The Incredible Unending Trial of Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

Dorfman's works have been translated into more than 40 languages and performed in over 100 countries. Besides poetry, essays and novels... Hard Rain, winner of the Sudamericana Award; Widows; The Last Song of Manuel Sendero; Mascara; Konfidenz; The Nanny and the Iceberg, and Blake’s Therapy...he has written short stories, including My House Is on Fire, and general nonfiction including The Empire’s Old Clothes: What the Lone Ranger, Babar, and Other Innocent Heroes Do to Our Minds. He has won various international awards, including two Kennedy Center Theater Awards. In 1996, with his son, Rodrigo, he received an award for best television drama in Britain for Prisoners in Time. His poems, collected in Last Waltz in Santiago and In Case of Fire in a Foreign Land, have been turned into a half-hour fictional film, Deadline, featuring the voices of Emma Thompson, Bono, Harold Pinter, and others.

Dorfman’s human rights play, Speak Truth to Power: Voices from Beyond the Dark (based on interviews with human rights defenders conducted by Kerry Kennedy Cuomo), premiered at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., in 2000, and subsequently aired on PBS as part of its Great Performances series. The play starred Kevin Kline, Sigourney Weaver, Alec Baldwin, and John Malkovich, among others, and was directed by Greg Mosher. It has gone on to numerous performances around the world, including a run in New York City.

Dorfman's play The Other Side had its world premiere at the New National Theatre in Tokyo, Japan in 2004 and opened off-Broadway at the Manhattan Theater Club in 2005. Other recent plays include Purgatorio at the Seattle Rep in 2005 and at the Arcola Theatre in London’s West End in 2008; Picasso’s Closet, a counterfactual history in which the Nazis murder Picasso, had its premiere at Theater J in Washington, D.C. in 2006.

His latest works include the Lowell Thomas Award-winning travel book, Desert Memories; a collection of essays, Other Septembers, Many Americas; and a novel he wrote with his youngest son, Joaquín, Burning City. In 2007, his musical, Dancing Shadows, opened in Seoul, Korea. This collaboration with Eric Woolfson, the principal composer for the Alan Parsons Project, won five Korean “Tony” awards.

He is also the subject of a feature-length documentary, A Promise to the Dead, based on his memoir Heading South, Looking North and directed by Peter Raymont. The film had its world premiere at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival on September 8, 2007. In November 2007, the film was named by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as one of 15 films on its documentary feature Oscar shortlist. The list was narrowed to five films on January 22, 2008, and A Promise to the Dead was not among the five Oscar-nominated documentaries.

Dorfman currently has several film projects in development with his sons, Rodrigo and Joaquín Joaquin Dorfman, including a screen adaptation of his novel, Blake’s Therapy.

Dorfman also writes regularly for such publications as The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Guardian (where he has a featured blog), Le Monde and L'Unità.

He is a member of L'Académie Universelle des Cultures, in Paris, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Controversy

Dorfman is one of the group of 88 professors who, in the wake of the Lacrosse players scandal, signed a controversial letter thanking protesters for "making a collective noise" on "what happened to this young woman" — assumed to be rape. The letter, which was later published as a full-page ad in local newspapers and reprinted across the country, has been widely criticized as a prejudgment; later it was determined that no sexual assault had occurred. The charges against the players were eventually dismissed and the District Attorney who prosecuted the case, Michael Nifong, was disbarred and jailed.