Trisha Brown
2011 Recipient
Trish Brown is a celebrated choreographer and the Founder of Trisha Brown Company. Over the course of her career, she has changed modern dance forever, pushing the limits of choreography by finding the extraordinary in the everyday. Prior to founding her own company, she co-founded the experimental Judson Dance Theater with Yvonne Rainer. In her early years, Brown created dance for alternative spaces from rooftops to parks in acclaimed experimental pieces, including Roof Piece (1971) and Man on the Side of a Building (1970).
In the 1980’s, Brown collaborated with with Robert Rauschenberg and Laurie Anderson incorporating design and music into her works. She created post-modern pieces including Glacial Decoy (1979), performed against a backdrop of Rauschenberg’s photographs and the ionic piece, Set and Reset (1982) with costumes and film clips by Rauschenberg and a score by Anderson. These works embody the unique style that remains a hallmark of her work.
Later, turning her attention to classical music, she choreographed a piece to J.S. Bach’s “Musical Offering”, “M.O.” (1995) which the New York Times called a “masterpiece”. Brown was invited to choreograph the opera, Carmen (1986) and her productions of Orfeo (1998), Luci Mie Traditrici (2001) and others have been critically praised. Constantly exploring new directions, Brown then went onto to collaborate with Laurie Anderson and Jennifer Tipton on a work for the Paris Opera Ballet and to explore new technology in collaboration with artist and robotics designer Kenjiro Okazaki. She is also an accomplished visual artist and her work has been exhibited across the globe at initiations from the New Museum to the Centre Georges Pompidou.
She has served on the National Council on the Arts at the invitation of President Bill Clinton and received the National Medal of Arts. She is a recipient of numerous awards, including a MacArthur “Genius” grant, five National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, two John Simon Guggenheim Fellowships, the Scripps American Dance Festival Award, The Robert Rauschenberg Award and many others.
