Board of Directors

Bruce Baillie is an experimental filmmaker and founding member of Canyon Cinema in San Francisco. In 1961, Baillie, along with Chick Strand and others, founded San Francisco Cinematheque. Baillie's intensely poetic, lyrical films distinguish his subjects from mainstream American society. His film Castro Street (1966) was selected in 1992 for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. He has received numerous awards including a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship; Creative Arts Award for Filmmaking, Brandeis University; honorary M.F.A., San Francisco Art Institute; National Endowment for the Arts fellowships; Maya Deren Award; San Francisco International Film Festival Golden Gate Award; Ann Arbor Grand Prize; Moholy Nagy Award; Guggenheim fellowship; and an American Film Institute fellowship.

 

Richard Foreman is a playwright, avant-garde theater pioneer, and the founder of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater in NYC. He has written, directed and designed over fifty-seven of his own plays in New York City and abroad. Five of his plays received Obie Awards for Best Play of the Year and five additional plays received Obies for directing and "sustained achievement". He has received the annual Literature Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a "Lifetime Achievement in the Theater" award from the National Endowment for the Arts, the PEN American Center Master American Dramatist Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, and in 2004 was elected officer of the Order of Arts and Letters of France. His work has been presented primarily at the Ontological-Hysteric Theater in New York, though he has gained acclaim as director for such productions as Bertolt Brecht's The Threepenny Opera at Lincoln Center and the premiere of Suzan-Lori Parks's Venus at the Public Theater. In 2004, Foreman established the Bridge Project with Sophie Haviland to promote an international art exchange between countries around the world through workshops, theater productions, visual art, performance and multimedia events.

 

Jasper Johns is a painter, sculptor and printmaker. At the age of 22, Johns moved to NYC where he met Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham and John Cage, with whom he maintained close intellectual and artistic relationships. In 1958, Leo Castelli discovered Johns while visiting Rauschenberg's studio and offered him his first solo show. It was there that Alfred Barr, the founding director of New York's Museum of Modern Art, purchased four works from Johns’ exhibition. Over the next fifty years Johns created a complex body of work with his characteristic rigorous attention to popular imagery and abstraction. In 1963, Johns and Cage founded the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, now known as the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in New York City. Johns challenged the technical possibilities of printmaking, painting and sculpture and laid the groundwork for a wide range of experimental artists. He remains at the forefront of American art and his work can be seen in nearly every major museum collection.

 

Beryl Korot is a video-art pioneer and an internationally exhibited artist. Her multiple-channel (and multiple-monitor) video installation works explore the relationship between programming tools as diverse as the technology of the loom and multiple-channel video. She was co-founder and co-editor of Radical Software (1970), the first publication to document artists' work and ideas concerning video, and in l976 she co-edited Video Art with Ira Schneider. In the 1980s, Korot concentrated on a series of paintings using a language she created based on the Latin alphabet. Drawing on her earlier interest in weaving and video as related technologies, she made most of these paintings on hand-woven and traditional linen canvas. More recently, she collaborated with composer Steve Reich on Three Tales, a documentary digital video opera in three acts and a prologue.

 

Jonas Mekas is a Lithuanian filmmaker, writer, and curator who has often been called "the godfather of American avant-garde cinema." His work has been exhibited in museums and festivals across Europe and America. In 1954, he became editor and chief of Film Culture and in 1958, began writing his "Movie Journal" column for The Village Voice. In 1962, he co-founded Film-Makers' Cooperative (FMC) and in 1964, the Filmmaker's Cinematheque, which eventually grew into Anthology Film Archives, one of the world’s largest and most important repositories of avant-garde films. He was part of the New American Cinema with fellow film-maker Lionel Rogosin and has worked with artists such as Andy Warhol, Nico, Allen Ginsberg, Yoko Ono, John Lennon, Salvador Dalí, and fellow Lithuanian George Maciunas. Since the 1970s, he has taught film courses at the New School for Social Research, MIT, Cooper Union, and New York University. Mekas is also a well-known Lithuanian language poet and has published many of his poems and prose in both Lithuanian and English. In 2007, Mekas opened the Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center in Vilnius.

 

Steve Reich has been referred to as "our greatest living composer" (New York Times) and "...the most original musical thinker of our time" (The New Yorker). From his early taped speech pieces It's Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1966) to his digital video opera Three Tales (2002) with collaborator Beryl Korot, Mr. Reich's path has embraced not only aspects of Western Classical music, but the structures, harmonies, and rhythms of non-Western and American vernacular music, particularly jazz. In 1990, Mr. Reich received a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Composition for Different Trains recorded by the Kronos Quartet. He won a second Grammy award in 1999 for Music for 18 Musicians. In 1999 a major retrospective of Mr. Reich’s work was presented by the Lincoln Center Festival. In 2000 he was awarded the Schuman Prize from Columbia University, the Montgomery Fellowship from Dartmouth College, the Regent's Lectureship at the University of California at Berkeley, an honorary doctorate from the California Institute of the Arts and was named Composer of the Year by Musical America magazine. In 1994 Reich was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, to the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts in 1995, and in 1999, awarded Commandeur de l'ordre des Arts et Lettres.

 

Robert Wilson is an avant-garde stage director and playwright who has been called "the world's foremost vanguard 'theater artist'" (New York Times). Over the course of his wide-ranging career, he has also worked as a choreographer, performer, painter, sculptor, video artist, and sound and lighting designer. He is best known for his collaborations with Philip Glass on Einstein on the Beach, and with numerous other artists, including Heiner Müller, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Tom Waits, and David Byrne. Wilson created landmark original works that were featured regularly at the Festival d'Automne in Paris, Der Berliner Ensemble, the Schaubühne in Berlin, the Thalia Theater in Hamburg, the Salzburg Festival, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival. Wilson's numerous awards and honors include an Obie award for direction, the Golden Lion for sculpture from the Venice Biennale, the 3rd Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize for Lifetime Achievement, the Premio Europa award from Taormina Arte, two Guggenheim Fellowship awards, the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship award, a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama, the Golden Lion for Sculpture from the Venice Biennale, election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the National Design Award for Lifetime Achievement, and Commandeur de l'ordre des Arts et Lettres.