Anja Thiemann

Anja Thiemann studied ethnography and history at Humboldt University of Berlin and acting at the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts Berlin, graduating with a diploma in both. Engagement contracts took her to various stages including in Jena, Graz and Berlin. She was a member of the German Institute for Improvisation (Deutsches Institut für Improvisation e.V.) and worked as a lecturer and performer at, among others, the International Winter Courses for Improvisation at the PALUCCA School Dresden.

For many years, A. Thiemann has been teaching students in the fields of acting, directing, singing, puppetry, choreography and musical theatre. Her teaching has taken her to the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts in Berlin, the Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy University of Music and Theatre in Leipzig, the Mozarteum University in Salzburg and the Otto Falckenberg School in Munich. She has worked as a director and producer, and has contributed to various publications.

In Munich in 2020, A. Thiemann founded the working group „’Forgotten‘ Female Authors“, which is dedicated to the rediscovery and new discovery of female authors and their works that have been displaced from the literary canon and the public sphere. On this subject, she directed the 2021 short film „’Forgotten‘ Female Authors – Back into the Light“. Following extensive research, she initiated staged works, all of which were based on texts by 18th-century female playwrights. She gives lectures on the subject, is preparing a new film project and is researching for a monograph that will make texts, some of which have not been published for over 200 years, and the lives of their authors accessible once again beyond archives. Moreover, she is in contact with various institutions in order to give the texts, and thus their authors, the stage that is due to them as part of the cultural heritage.