Claudia La Rocco is a poet, critic, and performer who works as a columnist for Artforum and writes about books and theater for The New York Times.
La Rocco graduated from Bowdoin College in 2000 with a degree in English. [1]
La Rocco began her dance and theater critic career as a general arts writer for the Associated Press. Beginning in 2005, she joined The New York Times as their dance critic until 2013. [2] She founded thePerformanceClub.org, which won a 2011 Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant [3] and focuses on criticism as a literary art form. She teaches at the School of Visual Arts MFA Art Criticism and Writing program. [4]
The Walker Art Center is a multidisciplinary contemporary art center in the Lowry Hill neighborhood of Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. The Walker is one of the most-visited modern and contemporary art museums in the U.S.: together with the adjacent Minneapolis Sculpture Garden and Cowles Conservatory, it has an annual attendance of around 700,000 visitors. The museum's permanent collection includes over 13,000 modern and contemporary art pieces, including books, costumes, drawings, media works, paintings, photography, prints, and sculpture.
Frank Hart Rich Jr. is an American essayist and liberal op-ed columnist, who held various positions within The New York Times from 1980 to 2011. He has also produced television series and documentaries for HBO.
Trisha Brown was an American choreographer and dancer, and one of the founders of the Judson Dance Theater and the postmodern dance movement. Brown’s dance/movement method, with which she and her dancers train their bodies, remains pervasively impactful within international postmodern dance.
Claudia Rankine is an American poet, essayist, playwright and the editor of several anthologies. She is the author of five volumes of poetry, two plays and various essays.
Martha Clarke is an American theater director and choreographer noted for her multidisciplinary approach to theatre, dance, and opera productions. Her best-known original work is The Garden of Earthly Delights, an exploration in theatre, dance, music and flying of the famous painting of the same name by Hieronymus Bosch. The production was honored with a Drama Desk Award for Unique Theatrical Experience, an Obie Award for Richard Peaslee's original score, and a Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for choreography.
The Asian Cultural Council (ACC) is a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing international cultural exchange between Asia and the U.S. and between the countries of Asia through the arts. Founded by John D. Rockefeller III in 1963, ACC has invested over $100 million in grants to artists and arts professionals representing 16 fields and 26 countries through over 6,000 exchanges. ACC supports $1.4 million in grants annually for individuals and organizations.
Lucy Rowland Lippard is an American writer, art critic, activist, and curator. Lippard was among the first writers to argue for the "dematerialization" at work in conceptual art and was an early champion of feminist art. She is the author of 26 books on contemporary art and has received numerous awards and accolades from literary critics and art associations.
The Joan W. and Irving B. Harris Theater for Music and Dance is a 1,499-seat theater for the performing arts located along the northern edge of Millennium Park on Randolph Street in the Loop community area of Chicago in Cook County, Illinois, US. The theater, which is largely underground due to Grant Park-related height restrictions, was named for its primary benefactors, Joan and Irving Harris. It serves as the park's indoor performing venue, a complement to Jay Pritzker Pavilion, which hosts the park's outdoor performances.
Maggie Nelson is an American writer. She has been described as a genre-busting writer defying classification, working in autobiography, art criticism, theory, feminism, queerness, sexual violence, the history of the avant-garde, aesthetic theory, philosophy, scholarship, and poetry. Nelson has been the recipient of a 2016 MacArthur Fellowship, a 2012 Creative Capital Literature Fellowship, a 2011 NEA Fellowship in Poetry, and a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction. Other honors include the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism and a 2007 Andy Warhol Foundation/Creative Capital Arts Writers Grant.
Misty Danielle Copeland is an American ballet dancer for American Ballet Theatre (ABT), one of the three leading classical ballet companies in the United States. On June 30, 2015, Copeland became the first African American woman to be promoted to a principal dancer in ABT's 75-year history.
Mira Schor is an American artist, writer, editor, and educator, known for her contributions to critical discourse on the status of painting in contemporary art and culture as well as to feminist art history and criticism.
Sasha Anawalt, born Marcia Evelyn Cunningham, is an educator, dance critic and former journalist who founded several arts journalism programs at USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism in Los Angeles, including a master's degree program in arts journalism (2008). She is author of The Joffrey Ballet: Robert Joffrey and the Making of an American Dance Company.
Valeria Luiselli is a Mexican-American author. She is the author of the book of essays Sidewalks and the novel Faces in the Crowd, which won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Luiselli's 2015 novel The Story of My Teeth was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Best Translated Book Award, and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Best Fiction, and she was awarded the Premio Metropolis Azul in Montreal, Quebec. Luiselli's books have been translated into more than 20 languages, with her work appearing in publications including, The New York Times, Granta, McSweeney's, and The New Yorker. Her book Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. Luiselli's 2019 novel, Lost Children Archive won the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.
Annie-B Parson is an American choreographer, dancer, and director based in Brooklyn, New York. Parson is notable for her work in dance/theater, post-modern dance, and art pop music. Parson is the artistic director of Brooklyn's Big Dance Theater, which she founded with Molly Hickok and her husband, Paul Lazar. She is also well known for her collaborations with Mikhail Baryshnikov, David Byrne, David Bowie, St. Vincent, Laurie Anderson, Jonathan Demme, Ivo van Hove, Sarah Ruhl, Lucas Hnath, Wendy Whelan, David Lang, Esperanza Spalding, Mark Dion, Salt ‘n Pepa, Nico Muhly, and the Martha Graham Dance Co.
Christopher Nigel Jones is a British-American journalist and academic. He is the chief theater critic and Sunday culture columnist of the Chicago Tribune. Since 2014, he has also served as director of the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center's National Critics Institute. Jones has appeared on the news broadcast of CBS-2 Chicago as a weekly theater critic.
Michelle Ellsworth is an American dancer and performance artist, as well as a professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at University of Colorado Boulder. Her "smart, singular" work spans live performance, video, performable websites, and drawing, employing absurdist humor, carpentry, technology, monologue, and dance. Ellsworth has received, among other awards, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Doris Duke Impact Award, a Creative Capital Grant and a United States Artists Knight Fellowship. ArtForum has described her work as "some of the most engrossing explorations of how the body and technology coexist and collide."
Fusebox Festival is an annual festival of contemporary performance works held in Austin, Texas, each spring. Founded in the mid-2000s, Fusebox is one of multiple interdisciplinary festivals that sprouted in the United States in the 2000s and was modeled on the Portland Time-Based Art Festival. In turn, Fusebox inspired other festivals, including the CounterCurrent Festival in Houston and Live Arts Exchange in Los Angeles. The festival is known for supporting local artists. It is part of an Austin city planning initiative to revitalize a 24-acre former airplane fueling facility into a creative district. Fusebox has grown from an original audience of 500 attendees in 2004 to 250,000 in its seventh festival, in 2011. In the mid-2010s, Fusebox made its shows free to attract a wider audience.
Carla Blank is an American writer, editor, educator, choreographer, and dramaturge. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, for more than four decades she has been a performer, director, and teacher of dance and theater, particularly involved with youth and community arts projects.
Jennifer A. Homans is an American historian, author, and dance critic. Her book Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2010.
Sharon Butler is an American artist and arts writer. She is known for teasing out ideas about contemporary abstraction in her art and writing, particularly a style she called "new casualism" in a 2011 essay. Butler uses process as metaphor and has said in artist's talks that she is keenly interested in creating paintings as documentation of her life. In a 2014 review in the Washington Post, art critic Michael Sullivan wrote that Butler "creates sketchy, thinly painted washes that hover between representation and abstraction.Though boasting such mechanistic titles as 'Tower Vents' and 'Turbine Study,' Butler’s dreamlike renderings, which use tape to only suggest the roughest outlines of architectural forms, feel like bittersweet homages to urban decay." Critic Thomas Micchelli proposed that Butler's work shares "Rauschenberg’s dissolution of the barriers between painting and sculpture," particularly where the canvases are "stapled almost willy-nilly to the front of the stretcher bars, which are visible along the edges of some of the works."