Anna Baryshnikov
Anna Baryshnikov is an actor, born 1992.
Baryshnikov specialises in the person who is slightly too much for the room, and she plays them without inviting you to laugh at them, which is a harder line than it sounds. Born in New York in 1992, she made her film debut in Wiener-Dog in 2016 and had a supporting role in Manchester by the Sea the same year, a film with no tolerance at all for a performance that reaches for effect.
The signature role is Lavinia Dickinson, sister to the poet, across three years of Dickinson. The series runs on anachronism and broad comic playing, and Lavinia could easily have been a joke about a bored nineteenth-century sister; Baryshnikov instead plays real thwarted appetite underneath the jokes, and the character becomes the show's most reliable source of feeling.
Her film work has stayed in the independent register: Meghan in The Kindergarten Teacher, Daisy in Love Lies Bleeding, Tara in Wiener-Dog. She is repeatedly cast as the one whose need is visible, and the reason it works is that she never plays need as pathetic. Her one network lead so far, Maya in the first season of Superior Donuts, is the outlier and the least like the rest.
Whatever comes next is arriving quickly. Five titles dated 2026 sit in this list, including a television Cape Fear, which suggests a career about to change size.
Movies (9)
TV (3)
Where to start with Anna Baryshnikov
Give Dickinson a couple of episodes before judging it. The tone takes adjusting to, and Lavinia is the character who most repays sticking around for.
Manchester by the Sea is the best film she has appeared in and a good measure of how little she needs to do to register. The Kindergarten Teacher is the most uncomfortable, Love Lies Bleeding the most stylised, and Wiener-Dog the coldest, a debut in a film with a deliberately unfriendly sense of humour. Superior Donuts is the broadest thing here and the least representative, though it does show she can play to an audience when asked. Start with the series, then take the independents in whatever order suits your mood.