JoAnne Akalaitis
JoAnne Akalaitis was born in Chicago, Illinois, United States on June 29th, 1937 and is the Director. At the age of 86, JoAnne Akalaitis biography, profession, age, height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, measurements, education, career, dating/affair, family, news updates, and networth are available.
At 86 years old, JoAnne Akalaitis physical status not available right now. We will update JoAnne Akalaitis's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.
JoAnne Akalaitis (born June 29, 1937, Chicago) is an avant-garde Lithuanian-American theatre director and writer.
She won five Obie Awards for direction (and sustained achievement) and was founder in 1970 of the critically acclaimed Mabou Mines in New York City.
Life and career
Akalaitis, a Lithuanian immigrant, was a pre-med student at the University of Chicago and then moved to Stanford University to study philosophy before heading to San Francisco without a degree at age 22.
She trained with the Actor's Workshop in San Francisco, The Open Theater Workshop in New York, and French actor Jerzy Grotowski. In addition, she served as a founder of Mabou Mines and gave workshops on Mabou's acting methods.
She has produced Euripides, Shakespeare, Strindberg, Schiller, Timothy Glass, Jannek, and her own performances at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York City Opera, Stephen Taylor's Cabaret, Theatre Theatre of Saint Louis, and The Birthday Party (by Harold Pinter) in addition to the American Repertory Theater, where she has performed Endgame, The Balcony (by Jean Genet), and The Birthday Party (by Harold Pinter). She was artist-in-residence at the Chicago Court Theatre and was the former artistic director of the New York Shakespeare Festival and the Public Theatre (1991-1993).
Ms. Akalaitis was the Andrew Mellon co-chair of Juilliard School's Directing Program, and she served as the Wallace Benjamin Flint and L. May Hawver Flint Professor of Theater at Bard College from 2012 to 2012. She has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts, Edwin Booth Award for Outstanding Achievement in Theatre, Rosamund Gilder Award for Outstanding Achievement in Theatre, and a Pew Charitable Trusts National Theatre Artist Residency Program grant.
Samuel Beckett tried to stop a postmodern version of his play Endgame, which she was directing, in the early 1980s.
Akalaitis is a Fellow of the New York Institute for Humanities and lives in Manhattan, New York.