Maria Ley-Piscator

Who was Maria Ley-Piscator?

Maria Ley-Piscator is best known as the wife of Erwin Piscator, Germany's famous left-wing theater director. Born on 1 August 1898 in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, Maria Ley sought to create a theatrical career for herself as a dancer in Paris and Berlin. Later, she turned to choreography and helped in several stage productions with Max Reinhardt, including A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Maria Ley also studied literature at the Sorbonne, where she met Erwin Piscator during his exile in 1936. After marrying in Paris, the couple moved to Manhattan in 1939, where they founded the Dramatic Workshop at the New School for Social Research. Their students included Harry Belafonte, Marlon Brando and Tony Randall. Ley-Piscator directed several theatrical productions off Broadway.

During the 1970s she worked as a teacher at the Southern Illinois University Carbondale and at Stony Brook University. Ley-Piscator died in New York in 1999 at the age of 101.