Anna Lengyel (HU)

After eight years with the Kaposvár theatre as a dramaturg and international manager, Anna Lengyel has worked with the renowned Krétakör Theatre from Budapestuntil the company was dissolved in 2008. As a dramaturg she has worked internationally with Tamás Ascher, Árpád Schilling, Pina Bausch, Declan Donnellan and Robert Wilson among others at theatres including the Lincoln Center in New York, the Vienna Burgtheater and the Berliner Schaubühne. Her most recent international engagement was with theSydney Theatre Company's Uncle Vanya, where she worked as associate director next to Mr. Ascher.

               In 2007 Ms. Lengyel started her career as an independent producer, founding PanoDrama to promote contemporary international drama and theatre in Hungary and contemporary Hungarian drama and theatre abroad. Her recent projects include Untitled Mars (an original work, a US-Hungarian co-production at PS122, a winner of the Obie Award), Gaia (a German-Hungarian co-production in Frankfurt, Berlin and Budapest), the award-winning first Hungarian production of Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life (which she also translated), as well as the first production of the Nobel-laurate Elfriede Jelinek in Hungary, Handiwork (Stecken, Stab und Stangl), which was the first project of PanoDrama's somewhat new profile.

               Troubled by the lack of Hungarian theatre's reaction to a growing racism and fascism in Hungary, Ms. Lengyel decided in 2010 to focus more on social and political issues. In 2011 she produced and directed  the first verbatim project in her homeland, Word for Word on the racist Roma murders in Hungary, which is running to great critical and popular acclaim. 

Anna Lengyel is also a translator of plays (Martin McDonagh's Pillowman, Sarah Ruhl's The Clean House, Tom Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll, Simon Stephens' Pornography among others) and has published articles on Hungarian theatre in the Theatre Magazine of Yale University among others. She is a Fulbright alumna and a lecturer at the University of Theatre and Film in Budapest. She conceives and leads workshops of new plays, including the Hungarian chapter of After the Fall, a project of the Goethe institute, whereby she developed a method for young playwrights to work with actors and a director from an early stage on, in addition to the leading dramaturg.