Anna Kohler
Kohler no doubt takes some of the information that she has amassed over many years of performing with powerful directors to make a theatrical work about what looking feels like, to the muse and to her creator. Directed by Caleb Hammond, the performance combines all the mediums Kohler has worked in (video, stage, and audio), the better to create a myriad portrait of a mature actress whose beauty lies in her restlessness and her ability to incorporate theatre’s sadness—all those ephemeral moments—into the energy and excitement that goes into making something new, which exists to disappear, too.
Hilton Als, The New Yorker, December 8, 2016
ABOUT
Actor, author and director Anna Kohler joined the New York experimental theater scene
in 1982, after studying in Paris and Austria. She has worked on stage with some of
America’s most respected playwrights, actors and directors, and was a longtime
collaborator and associate member of The Wooster Group, performing in such iconic
shows as “LSD, just the Highpoints... “, “The Temptations of St. Anthony.” ,“North
Atlantic” , “Brace Up!” and others. When she reprised her role as Natalya in the Group’s
revival of their seminal piece “Brace Up!” her performance was praised in The New
Yorker as the “emotional center” of the show.
As an author/director, she has conceived and directed plays that have been performed
in Austria, Germany, Brazil, and, of course, the United States. Her newest piece
“Impossible Joy” ran at The Tank theater in NYC in September 2022, as well as at the
W97 Theater Space in Cambridge, MA in June of the same year. In December of 2016
she premiered her show “MYTHO? Lure of Wildness”, co- starring Hapi Phace, at the
Playwright’s Center Boston and at Abrons Art Center, NYC. Other recent performance
credits include “I am bleeding all over the place”, written and directed by Brooke O'Harra
at La Mama NYC, John Jesurun's “Chang in A Void Moon - The Incubator Episodes” at
the Ontological Theater NYC. Before that she was touring with Richard Maxwell’s “Ode
to the Man who Kneels” all over Europe and Brazil and in “Yesterday Happened:
Remembering H.M”., at Central Square Theater in Cambridge. In December 2012, she
appeared as Medea at the Roulette Theater in NYC in “The Medead – the Opera” by
Fiona Templeton.
She also appeared in films like “Far away, so close” (Wim Wenders, with Peter Falk),
“White Homeland Commando” (Liz LeCompte, with Willem Dafoe), “The Cabinet of Dr.
Ramirez” (Peter Sellars, with Peter Gallagher), “On the Run”, (Bruno D’ Almeida, with
Michael Imperioli), The Book of Life (Hal Hartley, with PJ Harvey) and many others.
From 2010 till 2023 she held the position of Senior Lecturer in Theater and Performance
Arts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a teaching artist.
Over the years, she also translated over 20 modern theater works from English into
German and French and vice versa. These are several plays by Richard Foreman and
Richard Maxwell, as well as Young Jean Lee and others. She is looking forward to a guest appearance in Daniel Irizzary’s “Class dismissed” at La Mama, NYC in April 2025.
FILM/TV
THEATRE
