Mark Morris, received the 2012 Distinguished Artist Award at the New York 2012 ISPA Congress, Art in Action! Community, Crisis & Change.  View other ISPA Award winners.

Mark Morris

Mark Morris was born in 1956, in Seattle, Washington, where he studied with Verla Flowers and Perry Brunson. In the early years he performed with the dance companies of Lar Lubovitch, Hannah Kahn, Laura Dean, Eliot Feld, and the Koleda Balkan Dance Ensemble. He formed the Mark Morris Dance Group in 1980, and has since created more than 130 works for the company. From 1988-1991, he was Director of Dance at the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels. In 1990, he founded the White Oak Dance Project with Mikhail Baryshnikov. In 2001, Morris opened the Mark Morris Dance Center in Brooklyn NY providing rehearsal space for the dance community, outreach programs for local children and a school offering dance classes to students of all ages. Morris is also much in demand as a ballet choreographer and has created eight works for the San Francisco Ballet since 1994.  His work is also in the repertory of numerous other international ballet companies. Morris is noted for his musicality and has been described as “undeviating in his devotion to music.” He has worked extensively in opera, directing and choreographing productions for The Metropolitan Opera, English National Opera, and The Royal Opera, Covent Garden among others. In 1991, he was named a Fellow of the MacArthur Foundation. He has received eleven honorary doctorates to date. In 2006, Morris received the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs Mayor’s Award for Arts & Culture and a WQXR Gramophone Special Recognition Award “for being an American ambassador for classical music at home and abroad.”  In 2010, he received the prestigious Leonard Bernstein Lifetime Achievement Award for the Elevation of Music in Society.