Yvonne Rainer (b. 1934) is a dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker whose pioneering work has reshaped the fields of dance, experimental film, and performance art. A founding member of the Judson Dance Theater in the early 1960s, Rainer rejected virtuosity and theatricality in favor of ordinary movement and task-based actions. Between 1962 and 1975 Rainer presented her choreography throughout the U.S. and Europe. Since 1972, Rainer has completed seven feature-length films, beginning with Lives of Performers (1972) and more recently The Man Who Envied Women (1985), Privilege (1990), and MURDER and murder (1996). In 2000 and 2001 Rainer returned to dance via commissions from the Baryshnikov Dance Foundation to choreograph work for the White Oak Dance Project, including a 35-minute piece called After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. Rainer has received numerous awards and fellowships for her work, including two Guggenheim Fellowships (1969, 1988), three Rockefeller Fellowships (1988, 1990, 1996), a MacArthur Fellowship (1990-95), and a Wexner Prize (1995), as well as four Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts Degrees. Yvonne Rainer: Work 1961-73 was published by Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and New York University Press in 1974; The Films of Yvonne Rainer, a collection of her film scripts, was published by Indiana University Press in 1989; and A Woman Who…: Essays, Interviews, Scripts was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 1999. Rainer’s latest choreographic work, based on Balanchine’s AGON, was presented at Dance Theater Workshop, April 2006, subsequently traveling to the Getty Museum. A memoir, Feelings are Facts: A Life, was published by MIT Press in 2006.
