Anna Winger

Anna Winger (née LeVine; born 1970) is an American writer, producer, screenwriter, and photographer who lives in Berlin, Germany. She is creator of the television dramas Deutschland 83, Deutschland 86, Deutschland 89, and Unorthodox. She is a co-writer of the limited series Transatlantic, produced for Netflix and aired in 2023.

Early life and education

Winger grew up in Massachusetts. Her parents are anthropologists, and their work took their family to live in Kenya and Mexico for extended periods. She is Jewish.

She graduated from Columbia University in 1993.

Career

Before she started writing, Winger worked as a professional photographer for more than a decade.

Winger's first novel, This Must Be the Place, was published in 2008 by Riverhead Books.

Her personal essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Condé Nast Traveler, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and Süddeutsche Zeitung. Winger's radio series for NPR Worldwide, Berlin Stories, ran from 2009 to 2013.

Her first project as a screenwriter was Deutschland 83, a television drama which she co-created with her husband Joerg Winger. The series aired on Sundance TV (USA) in June 2015 and on RTL (Germany) in November and December 2015. The 8-episode series, about a young East German spy on an undercover mission to West Germany in 1983, had its world premiere when the first two episodes were shown at the 2015 Berlin Film Festival. Winger wrote the series in English, but it was shot in German. It is the first German-language series to be shown on American television.

In 2016, she founded her own Berlin-based production company, Studio Airlift. She also co-created and co-produced 2018 Amazon Prime and Sundance TV miniseries Deutschland 86, which is the follow-up season to Deutschland 83. The third installment, Deutschland 89, was broadcast in 2021.

Winger and Alexa Karolinski served as co-creators and co-writers of the miniseries Unorthodox, which debuted on March 26, 2020 and is Netflix's first ever show in Yiddish. She signed an overall deal with Netflix in 2021.

Personal life

Winger met her husband in Chile. Before 2002, Winger lived in New York, and her husband Joerg Winger lived in Cologne, Germany. In 2002, they moved together to Berlin, Germany. They have two daughters.

She speaks English, Spanish and German, but always writes in English.

Filmography

References

External links

• Official website
• Berlin Stories of NPR [1]
• Berlinale press announcement [2]
• Interview Interview about Berlin and writing between languages (blog)
• Anna Winger at IMDb