Barbara Sukowa has enjoyed a distinguished career on the stage in Europe, but is best known for her powerful performances in latter-day masterpieces of the New German Cinema. Sukowa played the victimized Mieze in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexander Platz, for which she received the German Best Young Actress Award, and she received the German Gold Award in Gold for her performance in the title role in Fassbinder’s Lola.

Equally memorable are her portrayals of fiercely independent radicals in Margarethe von Trotta’s films of Marianne and Julianne (Die Bleierne Zeit), which earned her the Best Actress Award in the Venice Film Festival and Rosa Luxemburg, for which she won a Palme d’Or for Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival.

Other credits include Zentropa (Lars von Trier), Voyager (Volker Schloendorff), for which she received nominations as Best Actress and Best Actress in a Supporting Role in the European Film Festival, 2009; Hierankel (Hans Steinbichler—Grimm Award in Gold, 2003), and ich bin die Andere (Margarethe von Trotta, 2007). The Discovery of the Curried Sausage, released in 2008, earned her the Best Actress Award at the Montreal Film Festival. In the US she played in The Sicilian (Michael Cimino), The Third Miracle (Agnieszka Holland) and Cradle will Rock (Tim Robbins).

Apart from her career as an actress, Barbara Sukowa is an internationally renowned concert artist. She has been critically acclaimed as a leading interpreter of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, which she first performed with the Schoenberg Ensemble under Reinbert De Leeuw and has since performed throughout Europe, as well as in Tokyo, Los Angeles (with Esa-Pekka Salonen) and, most recently, with Mitsuko Uchida and the Brentano Quartet in the US, London and Amsterdam. Other concerts include Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder with Esa-Pekka Salonen in Helsinki and Los Angeles, and with Josef Pons in Barcelona and Zaragossa. In 2006 she appeared with David Robinson and the St Louis Symphony in Zankel at Carnegie Hall performing Cassandra by Michel Jarrell, which she also performed at the 2008 Ojal Festival. In 2007 she premièred Reinbert De Leeuw’s Im wunderschoenen Monat Mai, also at Carnegie Hall; the subsequently released recording has received ECHO Klassik and Edison awards, and a Grammy Nomination for 2009.