MARIA G. BAKER is a performer and writer of prose, poetry, and drama, as well as a translator of all things German. Before moving to New York in 1994, she studied Theatre and Media Studies and German Philology at the University of Vienna, Austria, and worked as a freelance theatre and culture critic. In New York, she trained as a dancer at Ballet Arts and an actor at Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute and at The Ensemble Studio Theatre’s Institute for Professional Training, which she eventually headed as (program and administrative) Director from 1998 -2002. At the EST Institute, she also trained as a playwright. Her plays have been performed and produced at various NYC and NJ companies and venues (EST, Vital, The Tank, and Drew University, to name a few) as well as in Austria (dieMonopol). Full-length plays include Graceful Living (produced as a workshop production at Ensemble Studio Theatre) and Stammtisch der Hinterbliebenen (produced by dieMonopol in Austria). Her fiction writing has been published in UND Magazin, Skryptor’s Luminous Volumes, and Sonora Review, among others. In 2012, together with two colleagues, she founded Verbal Supply Company, a writers’ collective that, for seven years, emphasized the live reading experience and sought to bridge literary reading and theater. Most recent creative projects have been conceived as pieces of digital literature (see Verbal Supply), as well as primarily visual and video pieces (see Visual Supply), e.g., Remember This Time, and  As Lived, which was part of the exhibition Domestic State at Beard and Weill Galleries at Wheaton College.

Maria holds an MFA in Writing from Pratt Institute and is working to complete her MA in Digital Humanities at CUNY Graduate Center. She teaches integrative practices and strategies at Pratt Institute and is an associate at the Writing Center at Columbia University. Together with her colleague Kirkwood Adams from Columbia University, she has been studying the way  A.I. image and text generators impact creative practices and writing processes, esp. for college students. (Scholarship publications are forthcoming in Spring 2025.) 

In her ongoing collaborations with Brooklyn’s (Clinton Hill’s) older adults, she facilitates a bi-monthly writing group. With this writing group, Maria has edited and published We Live Here, and As Told, an oral histories project. Since the Pandemic, the writing group for older adults under her guidance has completed an online archive detailing their experiences in 2020, We Are Writing Through the Pandemic, and released a second book n 2023, The Resilients.

She is a member of Actors’ Equity, the Dramatists Guild, and Ensemble Studio Theatre.