Morton Subotnick is an American composer of electronic music, best known for his 1967 composition Silver Apples of the Moon, the first electronic work commissioned by a record company, Nonesuch. He was one of the founding members of California Institute of the Arts, where he taught for many years.
The Music Center is one of the largest performing arts centers in the United States. Located in downtown Los Angeles, The Music Center is home to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Ahmanson Theater, Mark Taper Forum, Roy and Edna Disney / CalArts Theatre, and Walt Disney Concert Hall. Each year, The Music Center welcomes more than 1.3 million people to performances by its four internationally renowned resident companies: Los Angeles Philharmonic, Los Angeles Opera, Los Angeles Master Chorale, and Center Theatre Group (CTG) as well as performances by the dance series Glorya Kaufman Presents Dance at The Music Center. The center is home to on-going community events, arts festivals, outdoor concerts, participatory arts activities and workshops, and educational programs.
Alvin Ailey was an African-American dancer, director, choreographer, and activist who founded the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, one of the most successful dance companies in the world. He created AAADT and its affiliated Ailey School as havens for nurturing black artists and expressing the universality of the African-American experience through dance. His work fused theatre, modern dance, ballet, and jazz with black vernacular, creating hope-fueled choreography that continues to spread global awareness of black life in America. Ailey's choreographic masterpiece Revelations is recognized as one of the most popular and most performed ballets in the world. In this work he blended primitive, modern and jazz elements of dance with a concern for black rural America. On July 15, 2008, the United States Congress passed a resolution designating AAADT a “vital American cultural ambassador to the World.” That same year, in recognition of AAADT's 50th anniversary, then Mayor Michael Bloomberg declared December 4 "Alvin Ailey Day" in New York City while then Governor David Paterson honoured the organization on behalf of New York State.
Robert Woodruff is an American theater director.
California is rich in dance history. In classical ballet, California is home to the oldest professional ballet company in the United States. The San Francisco Ballet, founded as the San Francisco Opera Ballet in 1933, predates both American Ballet Theater and New York City ballet. Barbara Crockett founded the Sacramento Ballet in 1954 and hosted the first festival for the Pacific Western Region of Regional Dance America in 1966. In modern dance, Ruth St. Denis established her second school in the Hollywood area of Los Angeles in 1940 while Lester Horton created the Horton Dance Group in 1934, also in Los Angeles. Ann Halprin founded the San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop in 1950 and continues to live and work in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Bay Area in also home to Alonzo King's Lines Ballet and Oberlin Dance Collective.
Daria Halprin is an American somtaic/ expressive arts therapist, author, teacher dancer, and former actress known primarily for her naturalistic performances in three films of the late 1960s and early 1970s and as Founding Director of Tamalpa Institute.
Lee Breuer is an American playwright, theater director, academic, educator, film maker, poet and lyricist.
Jim Newman is a film and television producer, contemporary art curator, gallerist and musician.
The Pick Up Performance Company, also styled as Pick Up Performance Co(s), is a not-for-profit theatrical producing organization founded in 1971 and incorporated in 1978. Its mission is to support the artistic work of choreographer-director-writer David Gordon and playwright-director Ain Gordon. Its producer is Alyce Dissette.
Eduardo Oscar Machado is a Cuban playwright living in the United States. Notable plays by Machado include Broken Eggs, Havana is Waiting and The Cook. Many of his plays are autobiographical or deal with Cuba in some way. Machado teaches playwriting at New York University. He has served as the Artistic Director of the INTAR Theatre in New York City since 2004. He is openly gay.
Anna Halprin helped pioneer the experimental art form known as postmodern dance and referred to herself as a breaker of the rules of modern dance. Halprin, along with her contemporaries such as Merce Cunningham and John Cage, and her students Trisha Brown, Simone Forti, and Yvonne Rainer, redefined dance in postwar America. In the 1950s, she established the San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop to give artists like her a place to practice their art. Being able to freely explore the capabilities of her own body, she created a systematic way of moving using kinesthetic awareness. Many of her works since have been based on scores, including Planetary Dance, 1987, and Myths in the 1960s which gave a score to the audience, making them performers as well.
Simone Forti, is an American Italian Postmodern artist, dancer, choreographer, and writer. Since the 1950s, Forti has exhibited, performed, and taught workshops all over the world. Her innovations in Postmodern dance, including her seminal 1961 body of work, Dance Constructions, along with her contribution to the early Fluxus movement, have influenced many notable dancers and artists. Forti first apprenticed with Anna Halprin in the 1950s and has since worked alongside artists and composers Nam June Paik, Steve Paxton, La Monte Young, Trisha Brown, Charlemagne Palestine, Peter Van Riper, Dan Graham, Yoshi Wada, Robert Morris and others. Forti's published books include Handbook in Motion, Angel, and Oh Tongue. She is currently represented by The Box L.A. in Los Angeles, CA, and has works in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Generali Foundation in Vienna, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm.
The Museum of Performance + Design, formerly the San Francisco Performing Arts Library & Museum, is located in the Bayview District of San Francisco, California at 2200 Jerrold Avenue, Ste. T. The Museum collects and makes accessible materials about the performing arts, with a special emphasis on documenting and preserving the San Francisco Bay Area’s rich and diverse performing arts heritage from the Gold Rush to the present. The museum produces public and educational programs, provides library services to researchers, and conservation and archival services to performing arts institutions. The Museum's collection includes personal papers of prominent artists, original costumes and design renderings, audio-visual recordings of live performances, original artwork, other artifacts, and ephemera. The Museum also serves as the official archives for many local performing arts organizations including the San Francisco Ballet, San Francisco Opera, Stern Grove Festival, and the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival.
Roy Hirabayashi is a leader in North American taiko. He is a composer, performer, teacher and activist. He is co-founder of one of the seminal taiko groups in North America, San Jose Taiko, the group's former Artistic and Executive Director, and active in developing San Jose's Japantown and arts community.
Ain Gordon is an American playwright, theatrical director and actor based in New York City. His work frequently deals with the interstices of history, focusing on people and events which are often overlooked or marginalized in "official" histories. His style combines elements of traditional playwrighting with aspects of performance art.
Melvino Garretti is an American multidisciplinary artist who works in ceramics, painting, and performance. His visual works are known for their recognizable abstract motif, which often includes a variety of colorful emblematic shapes, and symbols. He is an original member of the Studio Watts Workshop art collective, and a 1978 MFA graduate of San Francisco Art Institute.
Liam O'Gallagher was an avant-garde sound artist, painter and teacher whose San Francisco studio became an early gathering place for Beat writers and poets in the 1950s. He was integral to the creation of foundations and centers for human growth, including Feathered Pipe Ranch, The Ojai Foundation and the Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts.
The Studio Watts Workshop was an arts organization founded in 1964 and based in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, dedicated to providing working space for artists and offering a broad range of arts workshops for the local community.
Suzanne Jackson is an American visual artist, gallery owner, poet, dancer, and set designer with a career spanning five decades. Her work has been exhibited in museums and galleries around the world, including the Studio Museum in Harlem and the California African American Museum in Los Angeles. Since the late 1960s, Jackson has dedicated her life to studio art with additional participation in theatre, teaching, arts administration, community life, and social activism. Jackson's oeuvre includes poetry, dance, theater, costume design, paintings, prints, and drawings.
Margaret Fisher is an American performance and media artist best known for interdisciplinary works that pair gestural choreography to experimental visual theater characterized by a cartoon aesthetic with wide-ranging cultural references. She emerged amid a 1970s Bay Area experimental performance scene that included artists such as Lynn Hershman Leeson, George Coates, Bill Irwin and Winston Tong, and co-founded the intermedia production group MA FISH CO and the alternative theater Cat's Paw Palace in Berkeley. Fisher's work has been featured at the Venice Biennale, Dance Theatre Workshop, PS1 and The Kitchen in New York, SFMOMA, Image Forum (Tokyo), and the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal Mue-danse Festival; it has been reviewed in The New York Times, The Village Voice, Los Angeles Times, La Repubblica, Artweek, San Francisco Chronicle, and Dance Magazine. Critic Rita Felciano describes Fisher's approach as one of "artful intellect" and her multimedia pieces as "demanding puzzles, tightly structured and pervaded by a stillness and internal quiet." In addition to producing art, Fisher is an independent researcher and author of numerous books on twentieth-century performance, radio, film and poetry. She lives and works in Emeryville, California and is married to composer Robert Hughes.