She wrote the Off-Broadway plays The Baltimore Waltz (1992), Hot 'N Throbbing (1994), The Mineola Twins (1996), and The Long Christmas Ride Home (2003).

A longtime teacher, Vogel spent the bulk of her academic career – from 1984 to 2008 – at Brown University, where she served as Adele Kellenberg Seaver Professor in Creative Writing, oversaw its playwriting program, and helped found the Brown/Trinity Rep Consortium.

A productive playwright since the late 1970s, Vogel first came to national prominence with her AIDS-related seriocomedy The Baltimore Waltz, which won the Obie Award for Best Play in 1992.

She is best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning play How I Learned to Drive (1997), which examines the impact and echoes of child sexual abuse and incest.

Her play The Oldest Profession was first read in February 1981 at the Hudson Guild, New York City, directed by Gordon Edelstein.

[5] And Baby Makes Seven premiered Off-Broadway in April 1993, produced by the Circle Repertory Company at the Lucille Lortel Theatre.

[11] Artists Repertory Theatre, located in Portland, Oregon, presented A Civil War Christmas: An American Musical Celebration, from November 22 to December 23, 2016.

Vogel's first play with music, Indecent, co-created and directed by Rebecca Taichman, premiered at Yale Repertory Theatre on October 2, 2015, and then ran at La Jolla Playhouse (San Diego) in November 2015.

[20] The play "is inspired by the real-life controversy surrounding the 1923 Broadway production of Sholem Asch's God of Vengeance, the love story of two women.

[23] Vogel premiered a new work titled Mother Play on Broadway as part of Second Stage Theater's 2023-2024 season.

"[26] Carl's likeness appears in such plays as The Long Christmas Ride Home (2003), And Baby Makes Seven, and The Baltimore Waltz.

"Vogel tends to select sensitive, difficult, fraught issues to theatricalize," theatre theorist Jill Dolan comments, "and to spin them with a dramaturgy that's at once creative, highly imaginative, and brutally honest.

"[28] Vogel, a renowned teacher of playwriting, counts among her former students Susan Smith Blackburn Prize-winner Bridget Carpenter, Obie Award-winner Adam Bock, MacArthur Fellow Sarah Ruhl, and Pulitzer Prize-winners Nilo Cruz, Lynn Nottage, Dipika Guha, and Quiara Alegría Hudes.

[29][30] During her two decades leading the graduate playwriting program and new play festival at Brown University, Vogel helped develop a nationally recognized center for educational theatre, culminating in the creation of the Brown/Trinity Repertory Company Consortium with Oskar Eustis, then Trinity's artistic director, in 2002.

[46] In 2003, the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival created an annual Paula Vogel Award in Playwriting for "the best student-written play that celebrates diversity and encourages tolerance while exploring issues of dis-empowered voices not traditionally considered mainstream.

[48] In 2016, Vogel successfully completed and defended her doctoral thesis at Cornell University, more than 40 years after she began her graduate work.