Annie Baker facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Annie Baker
Baker at the 2014 Brooklyn Book Festival
Born	April 1981 (1981-04) (age 43) Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.
Occupation	Playwright, teacher
Education	New York University (BFA) Brooklyn College (MFA)
Notable works	Body Awareness (2008) Circle Mirror Transformation (2009) The Aliens (2010) The Flick (2013) John (2015) Janet Planet (2023)
Notable awards	Pulitzer Prize for Drama Steinberg Playwright Award
Spouse	Nico Baumbach
Children	1

Annie Baker (born April 1981) is an American playwright and film director. She is known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Flick (2013). She has written a string of plays which are set in the fictional town of Shirley: Body Awareness (2008), Circle Mirror Transformation (2009), The Aliens (2010), and Nocturama (2014). She made her feature film directorial debut with the A24 coming-of-age drama Janet Planet (2023).

Early life and education

Baker's family lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when Baker was born, but soon moved to Amherst, Massachusetts, where she grew up and where her father, Conn Nugent, was an administrator for the Five Colleges consortium and her mother Linda Baker was a psychology doctoral student. Baker’s father is Irish Catholic, and her mother is Jewish. Her brother is author Benjamin Baker Nugent. Baker graduated from the Department of Dramatic Writing at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. She earned her Master of Fine Arts degree in playwriting from Brooklyn College in 2009. One of her early jobs was as a guest-wrangler helping to oversee contestants on the reality-television program The Bachelor.

Career

2008–2012: Early works

Body Awareness, her first play produced Off-Broadway, was staged by the Atlantic Theater Company in May and June 2008. The play featured JoBeth Williams. Circle Mirror Transformation premiered Off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons in October 2009 and received the Obie Award for Best New American Play and Performance.

In October and November 2010, three Boston theatre companies produced Baker's three plays that are set in the fictional town of Shirley, Vermont: Circle Mirror Transformation, produced by the Huntington Theatre Company, Body Awareness, produced by SpeakEasy Stage Company, and The Aliens, produced by Company One.

The Aliens, which premiered Off-Broadway at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater in April 2010, was a finalist for the 2010 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and shared the 2010 Obie Award for Best New American Play with Circle Mirror Transformation. Her adaptation of Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya premiered at the Soho Repertory Theatre in June 2012, running through August 26, and was called a "funky, fresh new production" by The New York Times reviewer. Directed by Sam Gold, the cast featured Reed Birney (as Vanya), Maria Dizzia, Georgia Engel, Peter Friedman, Michael Shannon (as Astrov), Rebecca Schull and Merritt Wever (as Sonya). Michael Shannon and Merritt Wever received the 2012 Joe A. Callaway Award for their performances.

2013–2019: The Flick and other plays

The Flick premiered at Playwrights Horizons in March 2013, and received the Obie Award for Playwriting in 2013. The Flick won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the 2016 Critics’ Circle Theatre Award for Best New Play.

John opened Off-Broadway at the Signature Theatre on July 22, 2015 (previews). It was directed by Sam Gold and starred Georgia Engel and Lois Smith. The play ran to September 6. This marked the fifth time that Baker and Gold worked together, starting with Circle Mirror Transformation in 2009. The play is set in a bed and breakfast in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Time ranked it at No. 8 on its list of Top Ten Plays and Musicals for 2015. It is No. 8 in The Hollywood Reporter's "Best New York Theater of 2015". The New York Times wrote that the play is a "...haunting and haunted meditation on topics she has made so singularly her own: the omnipresence of loneliness in human life, and the troubled search for love and lasting connection."

John was nominated for the 2016 Lucille Lortel Awards, Outstanding Play; Outstanding Lead Actress in a Play (Georgia Engel); Outstanding Featured Actress in a Play (Lois Smith); Outstanding Scenic Design (Mimi Lien); and Outstanding Lighting Design (Mark Barton). John received six 2016 Drama Desk Award nominations: Outstanding Play; Outstanding Actress in a Play (Georgia Engel); Outstanding Director of a Play; Outstanding Set Design for a Play (Mimi Lien); Outstanding Lighting Design for a Play (Mike Barton); and Outstanding Sound Design in a Play (Bray Poor). John won the 2016 Obie Awards for Performance for Georgia Engel and a Special Citations: Collaboration, for Annie Baker, Sam Gold and the design team.

Baker's The Antipodes premiered Off-Broadway at the Signature Theatre Company with previews on April 4, 2017; it opened officially on April 23, directed by Lila Neugebauer. The cast featured Phillip James Brannon, Josh Charles, Josh Hamilton, Danny Mastrogiorgio, Danny McCarthy, Emily Cass McDonnell, Brian Miskell, Will Patton, and Nicole Rodenburg. The engagement was extended to June 4. John opened in the West End at the National Theatre in January 2018. It was directed by James Macdonald, and starred Marylouise Burke (Mertis) and June Watson (Genevieve). Andy Propst of Time Out ranked it the 40th best play ever written, and it made a 2019 list by The Independent.

2020–present: Directorial debut

In September 2023, Baker's "weird and great new play," Infinite Life, opened at Off-Broadway's Atlantic Theater Company directed by James Macdonald and featuring Christina Kirk, Mia Katigbak, Kristine Nielsen, Brenda Pressley, Marylouise Burke, and Pete Simpson. That same year she made her directorial film debut with the A24 coming-of-age film Janet Planet starring Julianne Nicholson, Zoe Zeigler, and Sophie Okonedo. The film premiered at the 50th Telluride Film Festival. David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter declared it an "exquisite debut" adding that it was an "an oddball marvel of comparable beauty". Tomris Laffly of TheWrap wrote in a mixed review that "[the film] keeps the viewer at arm’s length from both the joys and aches of tweenhood, when all you crave is to get just a step closer." Baker earned two Independent Spirit Award nominations for Best First Feature and Best First Screenplay for her work on the film.

Teaching

Baker teaches playwriting at New York University, Barnard College, and in the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton. She is also on the faculty of the Rita and Burton Goldberg MFA in Playwriting program of Hunter College. Additionally, Baker is an Associate Professor of Practice in the MFA Playwriting/Directing program at the University of Texas at Austin.

Personal life

She is married to Nico Baumbach, with whom she has one child. Her in-laws include Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig.

In July 2017, Baker was among 60 artists who signed an open letter organized by the group Adalah-NY that called on Lincoln Center to cancel performances of a play sponsored by the Israeli government and based on a novel by David Grossman. In an open letter to President Biden in 2023, she, along with other Jewish American writers, called for a ceasefire.

Style and recognition

Time Out New York wrote in 2008 that Baker "creates normal individuals coping with everyday issues in their small-town lives," and that her play Body Awareness "marks the arrival of a new playwright who would seem to fit the quirky bill, but aims for sincerity instead. Even though there's goofiness aplenty in her work, [she] sticks to straightforward narrative and simple dialogue. The writing isn't superficially clever, it's smart." The New Yorker said Baker "wants life onstage to be so vivid, natural, and emotionally precise that it bleeds into the audience’s visceral experience of time and space. Drawing on the immediacy of overheard conversation, she has pioneered a style of theatre made to seem as untheatrical as possible, while using the tools of the stage to focus audience attention...." The website The Daily Beast found that, "Baker’s skill is to make us work hard as an audience to make our own sense of her play[s] — the best, most enriching way to view any theatrical performance. Baker’s works are not for those who want easy, A-leads-to-B plots, and spoon-fed meanings... Baker, as all great playwrights do, is holding a mirror up to us all."

Works

Theatre

As a playwright

Filmography

Awards and honors

In 2008 she one of seven participant playwrights selected to write in the Sundance Institute Theatre Lab. A new play, titled The Last of the Little Hours, written by Baker was chosen for development at the Sundance Institute's 2014 Theatre Lab in Utah to be presented in July. Annie Baker directed the play herself. The play "follows the daily life of a group of Benedictine monks." Baker is part of the Signature Theatre's "Residency Five" program, which "guarantees each playwright three world-premiere productions of new plays over the course of a five-year residency." John is Baker's first play under this program. The Antipodes is her second play under this program, and premiered on April 18, 2017.

Honors

• 2009 - MacDowell Colony Fellow
• 2011 - United States Artists Fellow
• 2013 - The Steinberg Playwright Award, which included a $50,000 prize
• 2013 - Susan Smith Blackburn Prize
• 2014 - Pulitzer Prize for Drama for The Flick.
• 2014 - MacDowell Colony Fellow
• 2014 - Guggenheim Fellow, Creative Arts Drama & Performance Art
• 2015 - New York Public Library Cullman Center Fellow
• 2017 - MacArthur Fellow, which has a monetary amount of $625,000 over a five-year period.
• 2024 - Independent Spirit Award nominee for Best First Feature and Best First Screenplay