Pia Kleber

Pia Kleber has been professor of Drama and Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto since 1988. For 20 years she was also Director of the University College Drama Program. In 1999 she was made the first chair holder of the Helen and Paul Phelan Chair in Drama.

Professor Kleber has organized many major international theatre festivals and conferences helf at the University of Toronto: Why Theatre: Choices for the New Century (1995); Brecht: 30 Years After (1986); Mirror or Mask? Self-representation in the Modern Age (2002); Faust in the 21st Century Modernity, Myth, Theatre (2004). 

Her numerous publications include books on Bertolt Brecht: Exceptions and Rules: Brecht, Planchon and <The Good Person of Szechwan> and Re-Interpreting Brecht: His Influence on Contemporary Drama and Film (co-edited with Colin Visser).

Some of her articles are on“Theatrical Continuities in Giorgio Strehler’s The Tempest” in Foreign Shakespeare; “The Directing methodologies of Giorgio Strehler” in the Shanghai Theatre Academy’s Theatre and Art (translated into Chinese); “Die Courage der Mutter. Am Beispiel von Bertolt Brecht”, in Verklaert, verkitscht, vergessen. Die Mutter als aesthetische Figur.

She has also published articles on Robert Lepage, Robert Wilson and is presently working on a chapter about Roger Planchon for a book on Great Stage Directors published by Bloomsbury Methuen Drama.

In 2002 she was awarded the Bundesverdienstkreuz (similar to the Order of Canada) by the German President  and in 2015 the Bundesverdienstkreuz 1.Klasse (Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany), the country’s highest civil award.