ANNA K. JACOBS is a Jonathan Larson and Billie Burke Ziegfeld Award-winning composer, lyricist, and book writer. She creates works that ask questions without serving up the answers, and that feature a virtuosic art-pop energy.
In collaboration with Michael R. Jackson, Anna composed the music and co-wrote the book for the Drama Desk Award and Lucille Lortel-nominated musical, Teeth, which Vulture hailed as “a bloody, bawdy musical with banging songs.” It ran off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons and New World Stages, and an original cast recording was released on Yellow Sound Label. Her stage adaptation of Moana is in residence at the Walt Disney Theatre onboard the Disney Treasure.
Anna wrote the music for POP!, a pop art whodunnit musical about the 1968 shooting of Andy Warhol, which premiered at Yale Repertory Theatre in 2009. Other notable productions include a 2012 production at Pittsburgh City Theatre featuring Anthony Rapp as Andy Warhol. She also wrote the music for Harmony, Kansas, a musical about a gay men’s a cappella group in rural Western Kansas, which premiered at Diversionary Theatre in 2012, and received nominations from the San Diego Critics Circle for both Outstanding New Musical and Outstanding New Score. For George Street Playhouse, she wrote the music and lyrics for Anytown, which was developed in response to the devastating impact that oxycontin, heroin, and fentanyl have had on communities throughout New Jersey. She also contributed music and lyrics to the multi-composer works Witnesses (California Center for the Arts; 2022 San Diego Theatre Critics Circle Award for Outstanding New Production) and Letters to the President (Goodspeed Musicals), as well as music for Stella and the Moon Man, a family show combining music with shadow puppetry and digital video, which was produced by Sydney Theatre Company and Theatre of Image in 2005.
For Grove Entertainment, Anna is collaborating with playwright Anna Ziegler on A House Without Windows, a new musical about the life and disappearance of the child prodigy author, Barbara Newhall Follett. She is also developing Echo, a chamber musical-opera hybrid that examines the ages-old myth of Echo and Narcissus from the perspective of Echo.
In addition to the Larson and Ziegfeld awards, Anna is a recipient of the Eric Salzman Award for New Music Theater Composition. She has had the honor of being a former Sundance Fellow and Dramatists Guild Fellow, and has been an Artist in Residence at Rhinebeck Writers Retreat, the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, Goodspeed Musicals, Ars Nova, New Dramatists, Musical Theatre Factory, and Barrington Stage Company. A classically trained composer, her choral works have been commissioned and performed throughout the world by choirs including the New York City Gay Men’s Chorus, the National Lutheran Choir, the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Choir, the Nightingale-Bamford School, the Hotchkiss School, the Sydneian Bach Choir, and Coro Innominata.
As an educator, Anna is passionate about helping the next generation of songwriters to develop their voices and craft. She has taught musical theatre writing through institutions such as Princeton University, the University of Michigan, the New School, Temple University, and the Johnny Mercer Foundation. From 2018-2023 she was the founding Artistic Director of the New York Youth Symphony’s Musical Theater Songwriting Program.
Originally from Sydney, Australia, Anna has called Brooklyn home since 2006. She is of Lebanese and Iraqi-European Jewish descent.
Photo: Peter Bellamy