JUDITH MALINA trained with Erwin Piscator at the New School. With her husband Julian Beck, she founded the Living Theatre in 1947 as an artistic and socially conscious alternative to the commercial theatre. Since then she has directed and often acted in more than sixty influential productions, among them William Carlos Williams's Many Loves, Jack Gelber's The Connection, Kenneth H. Brown's The Brig, Bertolt Brecht's Man Is Man and Antigone, and the Living Theatre's collective creations Frankenstein, Paradise Now, and The Legacy of Cain, touring widely. After the death of Julian Beck in 1984, she directed the company alongside playwright-director Hanon Reznikov, whom she married in 1988, opening a new Living Theatre on East Third Street in New York and the Centro Living Europa in Rocchetta Ligure, Italy. The next Living Theatre opened at 21 Clinton Street in New York in 2007. Following Hanon Reznikov's death in 2008, Judith Malina continued to act, write, and direct plays at the Living Theatre. Her writings include plays, diaries, essays, and two previous collections of poetry, Poems of a Wandering Jewess (Handshake, 1982) and Love & Politics (Black & Red, 2001).
