Ines Geipel

Life and work

The story behind the role.

German theater professor, essayist and writer, former sportsperson.

Ines Geipel (born 1960) is a German academic and former athlete. She is professor of German versification at the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts (Hochschule für Schauspielkunst Ernst Busch) in Berlin. She was born in 1960 in Dresden in the then East Germany. She was a competitive athlete there before escaping to the West in 1989. After her escape, she was expelled from the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, of which she had previously been a party member. She studied sociology and philosophy in Darmstadt.

As an athlete she was a victim of doping in East Germany, and she was president from 2013 to 2018 of the group Help for Victims of Doping (Doping-Opfer-Hilfe). She was a co-plaintiff in the 2000 trial of Manfred Ewald and Manfred Höppner. In 2019 she was the subject of an episode of the BBC series HARDtalk, interviewed by Stephen Sackur.

Encyclopaedic excerpts from Ines Geipel; shortened for length and available under CC BY-SA 4.0.