My Bio

Anita Hollander has worked throughout Europe and America as an actress, singer, composer, lyricist, director, producer and teacher. She has premiered new works of composers and playwrights at Carnegie Hall, the Village Gate, Playwrights Horizons, and New York Shakespeare Festival, where she sang original work of Philip Glass. She received a Helen Hayes Award nomination for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Musical for the Olney Theatre premiere of The Fifth Season and originated the title role in the award-winning play Gretty Good Time at the Kennedy Center in Washington.

The White House presented her original one-woman musical Still Standing, which has garnered critical praise and awards from ASCAP, Billboard, NY Times and Back Stage Magazine, for writing as well as performance. Still Standing has been produced Off-Broadway and throughout the country and is available on CD (www.amazon.com). Recently, Anita premiered her new one-woman musical, Walking To Canada, the NY Solo Play Lab, and the piece is now published in a book of plays by women - Estrogenius 2003.

Anita’s most recent theatrical roles have been Emma Goldman in Ragtime (Gateway Playhouse/NY), Fraulein Schneider in Cabaret (Gretna Theatre/PA), Meg in Damn Yankees and Aunt Eller in Oklahoma (Downtown Cabaret Theatre/CT), Golde in Fiddler On The Roof, Sister Hubert in Nunsense and Blanche in Brighton Beach Memoirs (Surflight Theatre/NJ), and the title role in Shirley Valentine (Summerfun Theatre/NJ). This summer she will play Grizabella - the cat who sings “Memory” - in CATS.

On TV, Anita has been a promo announcer for NBC Today Show and narrated the acclaimed PBS series People In Motion featuring Itzak Perlman, Marlee Matlin and John Hockenberry. She's also appeared on As The World Turns, Oz, The Sopranos, Another World and recently had a recurring role on All My Children (on which her husband and daughter, Paul and Holland Hamilton, also appeared). BBC/London featured Anita on their program From The Edge, and MTV featured her in their Celebration of Diversity.

As a member of all three actors' unions, Anita serves as East Coast National Chair of the AFTRA Performers with Disabilities committee and has enlightened audiences in theatres and schools about disability with Boston's Urban Improv, Joseph Chaikin's Body Songs at the Public Theatre in NY, and Infinity Dance Theatre. She has toured as a Celebrity Against Cancer for the American Cancer Society, and for VSA Arts she appeared at the U.N. with Betty Buckley and Tom Brokaw. Anita also appears in the newly-released documentary entitled Joseph Chaikin: A Life in the Theatre.

John S. Wilson of the New York Times called Anita "provocative, funny, moving, communicative and beautifully polished...She has a wide range of vocal colors which she uses with dramatic sensitivity as well as comic insight...All this plus a charming presence that flavors everything she does."