Annelise Lawson is an actress, theatre-maker and teacher based in New York. She teaches contemporary applications of the Russian Étude method – an improvisatorial rehearsal tool designed to propel an actor’s imagination into the world of the text. Her work focuses on developing students’ technique and style through their personal senses of play and unique identities.
As an actress, Annelise often works in collaborative processes with international artists – including Dmitry Krymov, company members of Teatr Zar, and Tanztheater Wuppertal. She has performed regionally and internationally, including engagements at Signature Theater, HERE Arts Center, the LungA Art Festival, and The Araca Project, and has assistant directed at The Public. Her solo film Close-up won the NY Indie Theatre Film Fest, and she was named Best Actress by the Chicago Reader’s Best of Chicago Awards.
Annelise is on faculty at The David Geffen School of Drama at Yale and The New School for Drama. She also teaches at The Stella Adler Studio, Completely Ridiculous Conservatory, The Shakespeare Academy at Stratford, and abroad at The LungA Festival and Platform Skorohod in St. Petersburg. She is a founding facutly of The Pandemonium Studio with Christopher Bayes. She has an MFA in Acting from the Yale School of Drama, a B.A. summa cum laude in Theatre Arts from Carleton College, certificates in acting from the Moscow Art Theatre School & the British American Drama Academy, and is a graduate of the iO training program in Chicago.