Claire Trevor School of the Arts Appoints Rainer Distinguished Professor
Yvonne Rainer, influential choreographer-turned-filmmaker, will join the UC Irvine faculty as the first Distinguished Professor in the Claire Trevor School of the Arts.
Rainer is known as a pioneer of postmodern dance and author of the seminal "No Manifesto" that outlined her minimalist dance aesthetic and signaled a revolution in modern dance in the 1960s. Today, she is a multi-faceted artist who incorporates experimental cinema, choreography and movement, feminism, politics, writing and visual art into her work. At UCI, she will be a member of the studio art faculty and teach courses open to students in art, dance, drama, and film and media studies, primarily at the graduate level.
"Yvonne Rainer is one of the most original and influential artists of the last forty years, and we're enormously pleased she has chosen to make UCI her home base for continuing her creative research," said Nohema Fernandez, dean of the Claire Trevor School of the Arts.
"After four decades of sustained production, Rainer is as galvanizing to today's generation of young artists as she was when she first emerged. Her work and scholarship cross disciplines and will be tremendous additions for students of the arts and humanities."
As a mentor and teacher, Rainer has influenced countless students through her position as a founding faculty member of the New York Whitney Museum Independent Study Program -- one of the most competitive and prestigious post-graduate visual arts programs in the country. Many of Rainer's former students are professional artists, filmmakers, museum curators and art professors.
"I look forward to working with the UCI faculty, some of whom I've known for many years, and hopefully, I'll be able to inspire some students," Rainer said.
Originally from San Francisco, Rainer moved in 1956 to New York, where she studied dance with Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham. In the early 1960s, she co-founded the experimental Judson Dance Theater in New York's Greenwich Village. There, she broke with established dance tradition by incorporating into her dances everyday movements -- walking, running, sitting and standing still. Her signature dance, "Trio A," has been widely taught and performed.
Rainer's dances sometimes included film sequences, and by the mid-1970s, she turned completely to film directing. Her early films did not follow narrative conventions, but instead combined reality and fiction, sound and visuals, to address major social and political issues. She wrote, produced and directed seven feature-length films, which have won awards and been shown around the world, including "Privilege," winner of the Filmmakers Trophy at the 1991 Sundance Film Festival and the Geyer Werke Prize at the 1991 International Documentary Film Festival in Munich, and "MURDER and murder," winner of the Teddy Award at the 1997 Berlin Film Festival and the Special Jury Award at the 1999 Miami Lesbian and Gay Film Festival.
In 2000, Rainer returned to dance with "After Many a Summer Dies the Swan," commissioned by the Baryshnikov Dance Foundation for the White Oak Dance Project. She reconstituted the piece as a video installation that in turn became a key component of a traveling retrospective exhibition titled "Yvonne Rainer: Radical Juxtapositions 1961-2002," which showed at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions last year.
Rainer is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, notably two Guggenheim Fellowships, a MacArthur Fellowship, a Wexner Prize, seven NEA awards, three Rockefeller Fellowships and four honorary doctor of arts degrees.
Rainer's appointment at UCI is effective July 1, 2005. There are currently 15 professors at UCI designated as Distinguished Professors -- a title reserved for senior faculty members who have achieved the highest level of scholarship during their careers.
The Claire Trevor School of the Arts has about 1,100 students majoring in dance, drama, music or studio arts and nearly 500 pursuing minors in digital arts. The school is named after the Academy Award-winning actress whose career spanned seven decades and included success in stage, radio, television and film.
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