Distinguished professor joins UCI

Michael Miller

Yvonne Rainer, an influential choreographer and filmmaker, has been

appointed as a distinguished professor in UC Irvine’s Claire Trevor

School of the Arts.

On July 1, Rainer will become the 16th distinguished professor

currently at UCI and the first in the Claire Trevor school. The

distinguished title is reserved for senior faculty members who have

achieved the highest level of scholarship in their respective fields

and won national and international acclaim for their efforts. Rainer

will belong to the studio art faculty and teach courses in visual art

and film, mostly at the graduate level.

“Maybe I can inspire some students,” Rainer said. “I look forward

to a paycheck. It’s really my first steady job since I was in my 20s,

so that will be a change.”

About her appointment as a distinguished professor, Rainer said

she was “very flattered and very amused.”

A student of dance masters Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham,

Rainer co-founded the Judson Dance Theater in New York in the early

1960s and pioneered a form of dance that incorporated everyday

movements into performance. Her most famous piece, “Trio A,” features

three dancers performing different routines simultaneously. In 1965,

she composed the “NO Manifesto,” now considered a seminal statement

of minimalist dance aesthetic.

Apart from her dance works, which also include “After Many a

Summer Dies the Swan,” “Terrain” and “This is a Woman Who...,” Rainer

has also ventured into installation art and filmmaking. Her 1990 film

“Privilege,” a semi-documentary about women dealing with menopause,

won the Filmmakers Trophy at the Sundance Film Festival.

Over the last 30 years, Rainer has served as a faculty member of

the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York. She has

received two Guggenheim Fellowships, a MacArthur Fellowship, a Wexner

Prize, seven National Education Assn. awards, three Rockefeller

Fellowships and four honorary doctor of arts degrees.

Nohema Fernandez, the dean of the Claire Trevor school, said the

university had to court Rainer, who lives in New York, for more than

a year before the artist agreed to join the faculty.

“She’s a very well-respected artist with a long track record, but

it’s not easy for someone whose roots are in New York to make a move

like this, so we really had to show her what UCI and, specifically,

the studio art department had to offer her,” Fernandez said. “The

Southern California art scene interested her, so we were able to

finally convince her that it would be an exciting move for her to

come.”

Rainer, who has spoken at UCI in the past and had her works

screened by the campus Film and Video Center, is currently a scholar

in residence at the J. Paul Getty Museum.

“She has been incredibly influential over several generations, so

everyone here is excited about her coming,” Fernandez said.

As a distinguished professor at UCI, Rainer will join William E.

Bunney and Eric Stanbridge from the College of Medicine; David

Easton, R. Duncan Luce, David Malament, Donald G. Saari, Brian Skyrms

and George Sperling from the School of Social Sciences; J. Hillis

Miller and Ngugi wa Thiong’o from the School of Humanities; Masanobu

Shinozuka and Soroosh Sorooshian from the Henry Samueli School of

Engineering; Elizabeth Loftus from the School of Social Ecology;

Ricardo Miledi from the School of Biological Sciences; and Larry E.

Overman from the School of Physical Sciences.