Dr. Frank Hentschker
Dr. Frank Hentschker is the Executive Director and Director of Programs for the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, and an Associate Professor of Theatre at Graduate Center CUNY, the City University of New York. He holds a Ph.D. in Theatre from the Theatre Institute in Giessen, Germany. Starting as a puppet player in Italy he later on worked as an assistant and actor for American director Robert Wilson. With Joseph Beuys he created a performance for the “7000 Eichen” (7000 Oaks) project as part of Beuys Documenta 7 project in Kassel, 1982.
Hentschker founded the CUNY C-PAC Performing Arts Consortium, an association of over 20 CUNY stages—the largest theatre consortium in the nation. In the “International Contemporary Performance Series” he presented Rimini Protokoll, Jan Fabre, Andre Sherban, Romeo Castellucci, Rene Pollesch, Isabelle Huppert, Claude Regis, Robert Wilson, Christopher Knowles and many others. He is the creator and co-curator for over 10 years of PRELUDE—AT THE FOREFRONT OF CONTEMPORARY NYC THEATRE, an annual three-day-festival of New York based theatre artists and companies. In 2015 he founded the FTP Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance.
As a student at Germany’s legendary Giessen University of Applied Theatre Studies, with Andrzej Wirth and Hans-Thies Lehmann as teachers, Hentschker created DISKURS, the largest European Student theatre festival in Europe. He worked as Robert Wilson’s personal assistant and tour manager for “Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights” at Berlin’s Hebbel Theatre, and appeared as Hamlet in Heiner Müller’s own production of his play “Hamletmaschine” at Giessen University. Frank Hentschker taught in 2015 at the Theatre Department of Columbia University is currently working on a book project: “The Performance Texts of Robert Wilson”.
As of March 2016