Choreographer | Mark Morris

Mark Morris

Mark Morris was praised as “the most successful and influential choreographer alive, and indisputably the most musical” (The New York Times), was born on August 29, 1956, in Seattle, Washington. In addition to creating over 150 works for the Mark Morris Dance Group, he conducts orchestras, directs opera, and choreographs for ballet companies worldwide. Morris’s work is acclaimed for its ingenuity, musicality, wit, and humanity.

Named a Fellow of the MacArthur Foundation in 1991, he has received eleven honorary doctorates to date and a multitude of awards, including the Samuel H. Scripps/American Dance Festival Award for Lifetime Achievement, the Leonard Bernstein Lifetime Achievement Award for the Elevation of Music in Society, the Benjamin Franklin Laureate Prize for Creativity, the Cal Performances Award of Distinction in the Performing Arts, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s Gift of Music Award and the 2016 Doris Duke Artist Award. In 2015, Morris was inducted into the National Museum of Dance in Saratoga Springs, New York.

Morris opened the Mark Morris Dance Center in Brooklyn, New York, in 2001 to provide a home for his company, subsidized rental space for local artists, community education programs for children and seniors, and a school offering dance classes to students of all ages and levels of experience with and without disabilities. Morris’ memoir, Out Loud, co-written with Wesley Stace, was published by Penguin Press in hardcover in 2019 and paperback in 2021.