Anna Smulowitz.

Director. Playwright. Humanitarian.

For over 50 years, Anna Smulowitz has offered highly acclaimed theater productions while encouraging young minds to explore their creativity through the art of drama and movement. Upon her arrival in Newburyport, Massachusetts in 1979, Anna founded the Newburyport Children's Theatre, now known as Theatre in the Open. Currently, she runs Smulowitz Productions which presents dramatic and original productions across the Newburyport area. Smulowitz Productions collaborates with local actors, directors, designers, writers, choreographers, musicians, and stage technicians, providing contemporary and classical theater experiences for children, adolescents, and adults.

In 1994 Anna was given the Model People award by the Timberland Corporation for her work on Terezin: Children of the Holocaust. The play is the story of six children imprisoned in Camp Terezin during the Holocaust.  Anna, the daughter of two Buchenwald and Auschwitz survivors, was born in a displaced persons camp in Germany, and as a young child, emigrated to the United States with her parents. She wrote Terezin as a tribute to all of her relatives who died in the Holocaust. Anna wrote the play while a student at the University of Cincinnati and it premiered there in 1971. She was inspired to sit down and write after reading a real letter from 12-year old Chaim Landau, who was interned at the Terezin concentration camp, in which he wrote “If you should find this letter, please tell someone. We want to go home. We want our lives back. Please remember us.”

In 2008, Anna received the North Shore Anti-Defamation League's Leadership Award for her work with the play0- bringing it to schools and assemblies across the world and linking its lessons with contemporary issues like bullying and homophobia.

In 2020 Anna was asked to speak as a featured artist at the Global Citizen’s Circle Inhabiting Hope: Artivism Our Universal Language event, where she spoke about her work with Terezin, the play as well as the new film, under the theme of “artist as meaning maker.”