PLAYS IN PROGRESS MENTOR

ANNA K. JACOBS

Anna is a Plays in Progress Mentor. Her mentor interests: musical storytelling, heightened worlds, hybrid forms, feminist narratives, song structure. Request Anna as a PIP Mentor.

“I’m a big believer in the notion that musical theater is a form and not an aesthetic. I don’t think a musical should sound any one way. Music is language that has the potential to convey equivalent amounts of meaning as text, and just as the lyrics and libretto of a musical are shaped by its world and characters, as well as the voice of its creators, so too is the music. I ask the same questions of a musical when I’m working as its creator as I do when I’m empowering another creator in the capacity of a mentor: What’s specific about it? What’s clear and what’s not clear? What’s making it need to be a musical? Being able to really see the thing you’re working on is perhaps the most critical piece to knowing where to take it next. Think of me as your spectacles.”

ANNA K. JACOBS is a Brooklyn-based composer/lyricist and sometimes-librettist. Her musicals include Pop! (Yale Rep, Pittsburgh City Theatre, Studio Theatre), Harmony, Kansas (Diversionary Theatre), TEETH (O’Neill Musical Theater Conference), Anytown (George Street Playhouse), Echo (The Gallery Players), Stella and the Moon Man (Sydney Theatre Company/Theatre of Image), and the short musicals Cage Match and Magic 8 Ball (Prospect Theatre Company). She also wrote music and lyrics for Kaya: Taste of Paradise, a movie musical commissioned by the New York Film Academy and featuring Okieriete Onaodowan.. Currently, she and playwright Anna Ziegler are collaborating on a new musical for Barbara Whitman Productions and Grove Entertainment that’s about catfishing. Anna was recognized for her work as a composer/lyricist with the prestigious Billie Burke Ziegfeld Award. She holds an M.F.A. in Musical Theatre Writing from NYU-Tisch, is a former Sundance Fellow and Dramatists Guild Fellow, and has been an Artist in Residence at Ars Nova, New Dramatists, Musical Theatre Factory, Goodspeed, and Barrington Stage Company.

Anna is also a passionate educator. She was recently appointed Director of the New York Youth Symphony’s new Musical Theater Composition program, and is on faculty at the New School and C.U.N.Y. She founded and facilitates the NYMF Songwriting Workshop, now in its fifth year, and is a Teaching Artist at the Metropolitan Opera Guild and Lincoln Center Theater.