YVONNE RAINER

Distinguished Professor of Studio Art. Performance and history of experimental film.
Rainer trained as a modern dancer in New York from l957 and began to choreograph her own work in l960. She was one of the founders of the Judson Dance Theater in l962, the genesis of a movement that proved to be a vital force in modern dance in the following decades. Between l962 and l975 she presented her choreography throughout the United States and Europe, notably on Broadway in l969, in Scandinavia, London, Germany, and Italy between l964 and l972, and at the Festival d’Automne in Paris in l972. In l968 she began to integrate short films into her live performances, and by l975 she had made a complete transition to filmmaking. In l972 she completed a first feature-length film, Lives of Performers. In all, she has written, produced, and directed seven features: Film About a Woman Who… (l974), Kristina Talking Pictures (l976), Journeys From Berlin/1971 (l980, co-produced with the British Film Institute and winner of the Special Achievement Award from the Los Angeles Film Critics’ Association), The Man Who Envied Women (l985), Privilege (l990, winner of the Filmmakers’ Trophy, Sundance Film Festival l99l and the Geyer Werke Prize at the International Documentary Film Festival in Munich, l99l), and MURDER and murder (1996, winner of the Teddy Award at the 1997 Berlin Film Festival and Special Jury Award at the 1999 Miami Lesbian and Gay Film Festival). All seven films have been shown theatrically, semi-theatrically, and on PBS in the United States, at major international film festivals such as Berlin, Hong Kong, London, Paris, Edinburgh, Sydney, Toronto, Locarno, Yamagata, New York, Rotterdam, and elsewhere. In 2000 and 2001 Rainer returned to dance via commissions from the Baryshnikov Dance Foundation to choreograph new work for the White Oak Dance Project: After Many a Summer Dies the Swan and Trio A Pressured. These works were performed throughout the U.S. and Europe. Since then she has choreographed a re-vision of Balanchine’s Agon titled AG Indexical, with a little help from H.M., which was commissioned by Dance Theater Workshop and the Getty Research Institute. A re-vision of Rite of Spring was presented in 2007 at Documenta 12 and Performa 07. Rainer has received numerous awards and fellowships, among them two Guggenheim Fellowships, three grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, seven awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, six awards from New York State Council on the Arts, the Maya Deren Award (1988), a DAAD Fellowship (1976-77), a MacArthur Fellowship (l990-95), an American Film Institute grant, the Wexner Prize (1995), and a Bessie (2000). She is the recipient of four Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts Degrees: in 1989 from the Rhode Island School of Design and the Massachusetts College of Art, in 1993 from the California Institute of the Arts and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Six books dealing with her work have been published: Work 1961-73 (Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and New York University Press, l974), The Films of Yvonne Rainer (Indiana University Press, l989), Talking Pictures: Filme, Feminismus, Psychoanalyse, Avantgarde (Passagen Verlag, Vienna, 1994), Shelley Green’s Radical Juxtaposition: The Films of Yvonne Rainer (Scarecrow Press, Metuchen, NJ and London, 1994), A Woman Who. . .: Essays, Interviews, Scripts (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), Catherine Wood’s Yvonne Rainer: The Mind Is a Muscle (MIT Press, 2007), and a memoir, Feelings Are Facts: A Life (MIT Press, 2006). Yvonne Rainer: Radical Juxtapositions 1961-2002, an exhibition that included video installations — After Many a Summer Dies the Swan: Hybrid and Rainer Variations (a video portrait edited by Charles Atlas) — plus vintage photographs, posters, manuscripts, films, drawings, and notebooks, took place at the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, University of the Arts, Philadelphia, in 2002 and subsequently traveled to the Haggerty Museum at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions.

links:
http://www.zeitgeistfilms.com
http://mitpress.mit.edu