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 (Pulitzer Prize-winning creator of A Strange Loop), Anna composed the music and co-wrote the book for Teeth, which Vulture hailed as “a bloody, bawdy musical with banging songs.” The musical premiered off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons, where it played a twice-extended, sold-out run in the spring of 2024, and garnered numerous honors, including Drama Desk Award nominations for Outstanding Musical and Outstanding Book of A Musical. Following its successful world premiere run, a cast recording was released, and an open-ended commercial Off-Broadway transfer to New World Stages was announced for the fall.
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.
Currently, Anna is writing the book for a new stage musical adaptation of Moana for Disney Cruise Line. The production will debut at the Walt Disney Theatre onboard the Disney Treasure in December 2024. 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. In collaboration with songwriter Rob Rokicki (Broadway’s The Lightning Thief), she is writing the book for The Real Gemma Jordan, which started as an original movie musical commissioned and produced by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. 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 is currently on faculty at the New School, where she facilitates a Music Theater Songwriting Lab. 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