Annie Dutoit-Argerich

Actor, narrator, and host Annie Dutoit-Argerich, Ph.D. refuses to stay in one artistic lane. She was trained in classics in Switzerland before going to the United States, where she earned a BA in comparative literature at Princeton, a master’s in journalism at New York University, and an MA and PhD in French and Romance Philology at Columbia. Her research centered on the tension between politics and aesthetics in modernist works. 

Her teaching has ranged widely, from medieval French literature to the present day. She began at Columbia, where she was a finalist for the Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching, and went on to hold faculty positions at Barnard College and Arizona State University. After more than a decade in the classroom she turned to the performing arts, bringing her training in literature and journalism to the stage. 

On stage she enjoys taking on complex characters in demanding solo performances. Her Clara Wieck at Buenos Aires’ Teatro San Martín, in a one-woman play by Betty Gambartes and Diego Vila, played to a sold-out house and earned her ACE and María Guerrero nominations for best actress in a dramatic role. She brought the piece to Europe for its French premiere at Geneva’s La Cité Bleue, where she also starred in Ernest et Victoria, Alejandro Tantanian’s play drawn from the correspondence of Victoria Ocampo and Ernest Ansermet, directed by Marcial Di Fonzo Bo. 

Annie has developed a specialty combining music with theatrical storytelling. She has performed works by Stravinsky, Honegger, Saint-Saëns, Schoenberg, Milhaud, Liszt, Cage, and Prokofiev across three continents, turning each piece into a dramatic event. At the Teatro Colón she gave Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat, staged by Rubén Szuchmacher alongside the actors Joaquín Furriel and Peter Lanzani, and took the role of Joan of Arc in Honegger’s oratorio. She has spoken Schoenberg’s Ode to Napoleon, which sets Byron’s invective against tyranny, in the theatre Napoleon had built during his exile on Elba, and most recently in Oxford and Hamburg. Her Carnaval des animaux at Esterházy Castle in Austria was broadcast live on Medici TV, and she has toured Switzerland with the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, including Geneva’s Victoria Hall. She works in French, English, and Spanish. 

Beyond the established repertoire, Annie champions new work and living composers. She has premiered pieces by composers from Gene Pritsker to Joan Huang. Karol Beffa’s Cabot Caboche, after Daniel Pennac, she toured through Switzerland, and she performed Daniel Judkovski’s El Despertar de los Álamos at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. Most recently she took Carnaval de las Indias, by Marc Migó and Gonzalo de María, from Buenos Aires to the Palau de la Música Catalana in Barcelona. Loosely mirroring Saint-Saëns’s Carnaval, their version creates tableaux that summon the creatures the first explorers of the New World claimed to have seen, taken from their own writings and dramatized with wit by the playwright. Her next project is La vie profonde de Saint François d’Assise, by the Basque composer Aita Donostia, which she will perform with the Euskadiko Orkestra in a new adaptation marking eight hundred years since the death of Saint Francis. 

Annie’s commitment extends beyond the stage. At Suntory Hall in Tokyo, for the seventieth anniversary of the end of the war, she joined the novelist Keiichiro Hirano to read the testimony of survivors of the camps and of the atomic bomb, in the presence of the Emperor of Japan. That visit also took her to Hiroshima, and ten years later she returned to Japan for the eightieth anniversary, with programs in Kyoto and Hiroshima dedicated to peace. At UNESCO in Paris she has read Elie Wiesel, and she has traveled to Auschwitz-Birkenau as an educator with the Train des 1000. She serves on the board of Education Through Music, which supports music programs in underserved schools. 

Annie is the host of ARTE’s Concert Privé, a series in which leading artists choose their own repertoire and open their homes for intimate conversation. Episodes with Daniel Barenboim, Mischa Maisky, and Gidon Kremer combine chamber performance with personal reflection, and one with Janine Jansen is in preparation. She has also presented a season of Temporada de óperas on Teatro Colón’s YouTube channel, covered the Verbier Festival for Verbier Studio and Medici TV, and worked with Mezzo TV, which reaches audiences in seventy countries. In the fall of 2026 she joins the Humanities faculty at Manhattan School of Music.