Biography

Anna Beke is a dance scholar, dramaturg, and writer, with a focus on the history and aesthetics of classical and contemporary dance, as well as on questions of mediation, audiences, and cultural participation.

Her professional training began with a diploma in stage dance at the University of Music and Dance Cologne. She subsequently pursued interdisciplinary studies in Theatre, Film and Television Studies, German Literature, Philosophy, and Musicology at the University of Cologne, and in Theatre Studies, Modern German Literature, and Philosophy at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, where she completed a Magister Artium degree. Her master’s thesis, The Ideal Dance Body – On the Development of Aesthetic Concepts in Classical Stage Dance, constitutes a central theoretical reference point in her work.

Professionally, Anna Beke has held dramaturgical and curatorial positions at major dance and cultural institutions for many years. From 2006 to 2017, she worked in Dramaturgy, Audience Development, and Education at the Bavarian State Ballet. During the season 2024/2025, she served as dramaturg at the Semperoper Ballet Dresden, where she was responsible for programme texts, audience talks, and discursive formats for works of John Neumeier, Johan Inger, Kinsun Chan and Martin Zimmermann.

In parallel, she has been continuously engaged in teaching and research. Since 2022, Anna Beke has been a lecturer at the Institute for Theatre Studies at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, and since 2019 she has taught dance history at the University of Music and Theatre Munich. She also teaches dance history within the Dance Pedagogy Certificate Programme of the German Professional Association for Dance Pedagogy and regularly curates and moderates international academic conferences on dance and dance education.

From 2018 to 2022, she worked as a research associate at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt within the BMBF-funded research project Human in Motion. In this context, she was co-editor of the volume Remembering and Preserving: The Bauhaus in Its Time (kopaed, 2025) and curator of the exhibition Bauhaus for All! at the Jewish Museum of Franconia.

As a writer and editor, Anna Beke contributes to national print and online media (a.o. Münchner Merkur, Münchner Feuilleton, Dance for You-Magazine) as well as to programme books and publications of leading dance institutions as Vienna State Ballet, Semperoper Ballet, Bavarian Youth Ballet Munich. Since 2023, she has been an editor at tanznetz.de. Her publications include scholarly articles, essays, encyclopaedia entries, interviews, and reviews.

In addition, Anna Beke serves as a juror and expert in funding programmes for dance and choreography and is active in art and cultural mediation within museum contexts.