Mount Holyoke College

Rachel Rosenthal, the acclaimed artistic director of The Rachel Rosenthal Company, innovative and revolutionary performer, and bold animal rights activist, is the 2007-2008 Weissman Center Leading Women in the Arts guest artist in residence at Mount Holyoke College. Rosenthal believes in the power of interdisciplinarity, change, and the bold unpredictability of forms, bodies, sights, and sounds. She has been hailed by critics as a "monument and a marvel" for her pioneering performance techniques.

The daughter of Russian parents who left Europe for Brazil and then the United States during World War II, Rosenthal graduated from the High School of Music and Art in New York City. She went on to study art, dance, and theatre in New York and Paris with teachers such as Jean-Louis Barrault, Merce Cunningham, Hans Hoffmann, and Erwin Piscator. Since establishing herself in California in the 1950s, she has created companies and shaped the arts culture in significant ways. She founded the Instant Theatre, an experimental drama company that she both directed and with which she also performed and also co-founded Womanspace, the Los Angeles-based organization that created and maintained feminist art galleries. She has been a visiting artist at such institutions as the Art Institute of Chicago, New York University, California Institute of the Arts, and the Institute for Studies in the Arts in Tempe, Arizona.

Rosenthal has received prestigious honors and awards during her substantial career, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the J. Paul Getty Foundation. She is a five-time winner of USIA travel grants, and has received grants from Art Matters, NEA Interarts, The Tides Foundation, ESRR Vision Trust, and the Foundation. She was awarded an Obie for Rachel’s Brain and also has received awards from the College Art Association and from the Women’s Caucus for the Arts which recognized her for outstanding achievement in the arts. Rosenthal has performed throughout the globe at prestigious venues such as Lincoln Center in New York City and in well-known festivals including the Festival Internacional de Teatro in Granada, Spain, Jacob’s Pillow Splash Festival in Massachusetts, and The Performance Space in Sydney Australia.

According to Rachel Rosenthal, “who are you and what you make cannot be separated.” In this year’s Leading Women in the Arts lecture, she will deliberate further on her perspectives on the inextricable links between the personal and the political, and reflect further on the extra-ordinary nature of art and life.

Ann Hamilton is renowned for her site-specific works and provocative uses of materials and medium. An Ohio native, she earned her B.A. in textile design at the University of Kansas and her M.F.A. at Yale University.

In 1999, she was chosen to represent the United States at the historic Venice Biennale. Her presentation, which focused on American slavery and oppression, incorporated the use of Braille and vivid red powder that rendered words and language of the exhibit visible.

Her commissions include the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Allegheny Riverfront Park which received the Progressive Architecture Citation Award, Corpus for Mass MoCA North Adams, Masschusetts, and commissioned works for the San Francisco Public Library, the Seattle Central Library and the University of Minnesota.

Trisha Brown, the internationally renowned choreographer and legendary founder of the Trisha Brown Dance Company, delivered in Spring 2006 the inaugural lecture of the Leading Women in the Arts series in Spring 2006.

Her presentation, Set and Reset, was a central event in a 5-College Dance Department initiative that included three dance recitals by 5-College dance students of "Set and Reset/Reset" and master classes with Trisha Brown at Mount Holyoke College.