Angna Enters

Anita "Angna" Enters (April 18, 1897 – February 25, 1989) was an American dancer, mime, painter, writer, novelist and playwright. She studied at the Art Students League of New York and was a 1934 Guggenheim fellow. She wrote a novel and three autobiographies as well as films Lost Angel and Tenth Avenue Angel (1948).

Early life Enters was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and graduated from North Division High School in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She saw the first Denishawn concert tour in 1925, and the following year, an American tour of Sergei Diaghilev's Les Ballets Russes.

Emergence as a dancer Enters moved to New York to study at the Art Students League of New York in 1920, and began to study dance with Michio Itō the following year, eventually performing as Michio's partner in 1933. Her solo program, The Theatre of Angna Enters, toured the United States and Europe until 1939 and was performed, though less often, until 1960.

Visual artist Enters created a large body of visual art, including sketches, landscape drawings, archaeological studies, costume plates, water colors and oil portraits. Many of her sketches and paintings were exhibited in the United States and Europe.

Writing Enters wrote three volumes of autobiography – First Person Plural (1937), Silly Girl (1944) and Artist's Life (1958). She also wrote a novel, Among the Daughters (1956), and a book on her work, On Mime (1966). Her plays, Love Possessed Juana: A Play of the Inquisition in Spain, co-written with Louis Kalonyme, and The Unknown Lover, were presented by the Houston Little Theater in 1946 and 1947. Enters is also credited with having co-written two Hollywood films, Lost Angel (1943) and Tenth Avenue Angel (1948).

Teaching Enters' first teaching work came at the Stella Adler Studio, where she taught from 1957 to 1960. She was artist-in-residence at the Dallas Theatre Center in 1961 and 1962, and taught mime at Baylor University during that year. She spent the following school year at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. In 1970 and 1971 she was artist-in-residence at Pennsylvania State University, during which time she gave her last known public performance.

Enters' books First Person Plural. New York: Stackpole Sons, 1937. Love Possessed Juana (queen of Castile) a play in four acts. New York: Twice a Year Press, 1939. Silly Girl, a Portrait of Personal Remembrance. Cambridge, MA: Houghton Mifflin company, 1944. Among the Daughters, a Novel. New York: Coward-McCann, 1955. Artist's Life. New York: Coward-McCann, 1958. On Mime, second edition. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1968 (first edition 1965).