Anna Kohler (alternative spellings: Anna Köhler or Anna Koehler) is a German-American theater actress, director and translator. She is currently (since September 2010) a Senior Lecturer in Theater Arts at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

Early life

She was born in

Giessen Giessen, spelled Gießen in German (), is a town in the German state (''Bundesland'') of Hesse, capital of both the district of Giessen and the administrative region of Giessen. The population is approximately 90,000, with roughly 37,000 univers ...

, Germany, and after graduating from high school (Gymnasium) in 1976, she trained at the Conservatory for Art and Drama, the Mozarteum, in Salzburg (Austria) and graduated at the Université de Paris VIII, Vincennes. A collaboration with

Stuart Sherman (artist) Stuart A. Sherman (9 November 1945 – 14 September 2001) was an American performance artist, playwright, filmmaker, videographer, poet, essayist, sculptor and collagist. Life and career Sherman was born 9 November 1945 to Helen Gordon and Sa ...

brought her to New York in 1982.

Career

As a performer, Köhler has worked with

John Jesurun John Jesurun is a writer, director and multi-media artist, based in New York City. His work ''Chang in a Void Moon'' is a live serial running since 1983, originally at the Pyramid Club in the East Village and now less frequently at venues worl ...

Richard Foreman Richard Foreman (born June 10, 1937 in New York City) is an American avant-garde playwright and the founder of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater. Achievements and awards Foreman has written, directed and designed over fifty of his own plays, b ...

, Jeff Weiss,

Fiona Templeton Fiona Templeton is an experimental director, playwright, poet and performer. Born in Scotland in 1951, she co-founded London's '' Theatre of Mistakes'' in the 1970s and lived for many years in the East Village of Manhattan. Her performance wo ...

and Georg Osterman. Her night club performances with

Steve Buscemi Steven Vincent Buscemi ( ,As stated in interviews by Buscemi himself, some may insist that his pronunciation of his own name is "wrong" because it does not match the original Italian pronunciation as well. It is not uncommon for people to pronou ...

and

Mark Boone Junior Mark Boone Junior (born Mark Heidrich; March 17, 1955) is an American character actor, best known for his TV roles as Bobby Munson in ''Sons of Anarchy'' (2008–14) and Patrick "Pat" Brown in '' Last Man On Earth'', and film roles in Christopher ...

were legendary. Among others, she appeared in

Werner Herzog Werner Herzog (; born 5 September 1942) is a German film director, screenwriter, author, actor, and opera director, regarded as a pioneer of New German Cinema. His films often feature ambitious protagonists with impossible dreams, people with un ...

's Variete at the

Hebbel Theater The Hebbel-Theater (Hebbel Theatre) is a historic theatre building for plays in Berlin-Kreuzberg, Germany. It has been a venue of the company Hebbel am Ufer (HAU) from 2003. The theatre, with approximately 800 seats, was built by Oskar Kaufmann i ...

in Berlin. Anna Köhler is an Associate Member of the Wooster Group; she was full time member of the group from 1983 to 1993. In 2003, she reprised her role as Natalya in the Wooster Group's revival of Brace Up!; her performance was praised in ''

The New Yorker ''The New Yorker'' is an American weekly magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. Founded as a weekly in 1925, the magazine is published 47 times annually, with five of these issues ...

'' as the "emotional center" of the show. More recently, she appeared in Richard Maxwell's "Ode to the Man Who Kneels". Her film work includes Hal Hartley's The Book of Life, Bruno de Almeida's On the Run with Michael Imperioli, and uncredited appearances in

Jonathan Demme Robert Jonathan Demme ( ; February 22, 1944 – April 26, 2017) was an American filmmaker. Beginning his career under B-movie producer Roger Corman, Demme made his directorial debut with the 1974 women-in-prison film ''Caged Heat'', before ...

's Philadelphia, as well as " Sex and the City" (Episode 6: Secret Sex.) As a translator, Köhler has translated works from English to German as well as from German to English; her translation of Rene Pollesch's "24 Stunden sind kein Tag" (24 hours are not a day) has been published in Theater (

Duke University Press Duke University Press is an academic publisher and university press affiliated with Duke University. It was founded in 1921 by William T. Laprade as The Trinity College Press. (Duke University was initially called Trinity College). In 1926 Du ...

), and John Jesurun's "Philoctetes" in Theater der Zeit (2005). She also translated Norway.today by the Swiss playwright Igor Bauersima (available through the Goethe Institut Theater Library) into English, and several plays by Richard Foreman and Richard Maxwell into German.

References

External links

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IMDb
{{DEFAULTSORT:Kohler, Anna Year of birth missing (living people) Living people West German emigrants German–English translators English–German translators German actresses Immigrants to the United States