Yvonne Rainer

Yvonne Rainer was born in San Francisco in 1934. She trained as a modern dancer in New York from 1957 and began to choreograph her own work in 1960. She was one of the founders of the Judson Dance Theater in 1962, beginning the movement that proved to be a vital force in modern dance in the following decades. Between 1962 and 1975 she presented her choreography throughout the United States and Europe, notably on Broadway in 1969, in Scandinavia, London, Germany, and Italy between 1964 and 1972, and at the Festival D’Automne in Paris in 1972. In 1968 she began to integrate short films into her live performances and by 1975 she had made a complete transition to filmmaking. Rainer has received numerous awards and fellowships, among them two Guggenheims, two Rockefellers, seven awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, six awards from New York State Council on the Arts, a Maya Deren Award (1988), a DAAD Fellowship(1976-77), a MacArthur Prize (1990-95), an American Film Institute grant, and a Wexner Prize (1995). She is the recipient of three Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts Degrees: in 1989 from the Rhode Island School of Design and the Massachusetts College of Art, and in 1993 from the California Institute of the Arts.