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Arts First
ARTS FIRST is an annual arts festival held at Harvard University over four days each May. It includes performances or shows involving musical, theatrical, and artistic groups on campus. It was founded by alum John Lithgow in 1994 to honor the artistic community at Harvard, and is run by Harvard's Office for the Arts (OFA). The festival is a public event and many of the events are free. Participation All Harvard affiliates (undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, staff, and alumni/ae) may apply to perform and exhibit artwork during ARTS FIRST. Performing ensembles may include non-Harvard affiliates, as long as at least one performer is a Harvard affiliate. The festival involves up to 2,000 artists, giving over 100 performances and exhibitions. Volunteers are recruited to assist in running the festival. They are not required to be Harvard alumni. Participant funding Some funding is provided for selected Public Art projects in Harvard Yard. ARTS FIRST Performance Fair performa ...
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Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and one of the most prestigious and highly ranked universities in the world. The university is composed of ten academic faculties plus Harvard Radcliffe Institute. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences offers study in a wide range of undergraduate and graduate academic disciplines, and other faculties offer only graduate degrees, including professional degrees. Harvard has three main campuses: the Cambridge campus centered on Harvard Yard; an adjoining campus immediately across Charles River in the Allston neighborhood of Boston; and the medical campus in Boston's Longwood Medical Area. Harvard's endowment is valued at $50.9 billion, making it the wealthiest academic institution in the world. Endowment inco ...
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Maxine Kumin
Maxine Kumin (June 6, 1925 – February 6, 2014) was an American poet and author. She was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1981–1982. Biography Early years Maxine Kumin was born Maxine Winokur on June 6, 1925 in Philadelphia, the daughter of Jewish parents, and attended a Catholic kindergarten and primary school. She received her B.A. in 1946 and her M.A. in 1948 from Radcliffe College. In June 1946 she married Victor Kumin, an engineering consultant; they had three children, two daughters and a son. In 1957, she studied poetry with John Holmes at the Boston Center for Adult Education. There she met Anne Sexton, with whom she started a friendship that continued until Sexton's suicide in 1974. Kumin taught English from 1958 to 1961 and 1965 to 1968 at Tufts University; from 1961 to 1963 she was a scholar at the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study. She also held appointments as a visiting lecturer and poet in residence at many Americ ...
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Colson Whitehead
Arch Colson Chipp Whitehead (born November 6, 1969) is an American novelist. He is the author of eight novels, including his 1999 debut work '' The Intuitionist''; '' The Underground Railroad'' (2016), for which he won the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction again in 2020 for '' The Nickel Boys''. He has also published two books of non-fiction. In 2002, he received a MacArthur Genius Grant. Life Arch Colson Chipp Whitehead was born in New York City on November 6, 1969, and grew up in Manhattan. He is one of four children of successful entrepreneur parents who owned an executive recruiting firm. As a child in Manhattan, Whitehead went by his first name Arch. He later switched to Chipp, before switching to Colson. He attended Trinity School in Manhattan and graduated from Harvard University in 1991. In college, he became friends with poet Kevin Young. Early in his career, Whitehead lived in Fort Gr ...
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Frank Gehry
Frank Owen Gehry, , FAIA (; ; born ) is a Canadian-born American architect and designer. A number of his buildings, including his private residence in Santa Monica, California, have become world-renowned attractions. His works are considered among the most important of contemporary architecture in the 2010 World Architecture Survey, leading '' Vanity Fair'' to call him "the most important architect of our age". He is also the designer of the National Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial. Early life Gehry was born Frank Owen Goldberg on February 28, 1929, in Toronto, Ontario, to parents Sadie Thelma (née Kaplanski/Caplan) and Irving Goldberg. His father was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Russian Jewish parents, and his mother was a Polish Jewish immigrant born in Łódź.''Finding Your Roots'', February 2, 2016, PBS A creative child, he was encouraged by his grandmother, Leah Caplan, with whom he built little cities out of scraps of wood. With these scraps from her husband's hard ...
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Damian Woetzel
Damian Woetzel (born May 17, 1967) is an American choreographer. Woetzel was a principal dancer with the New York City Ballet, where he performed from 1985 until 2008. He also frequently performed with companies like the Kirov Ballet and American Ballet Theatre, until his retirement from the stage in 2008. Woetzel has also choreographed a number of ballets for NYCB and other companies. Among his awards, Woetzel has received the Harvard Arts Medal. and the inaugural Gene Kelly Legacy Award. In May 2017, Woetzel was named President of the Juilliard School, replacing Joseph W. Polisi. Early life and education Woetzel was originally trained in Boston at E. Virginia Williams ballet school, studying with Williams and Violette Verdy, and then moved to Los Angeles at 15 where he studied with Irina Kosmovska at the Los Angeles Ballet School. He then joined John Clifford’s Los Angeles Ballet and toured nationally with this company including to New York City where he made his debu ...
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Margaret Atwood
Margaret Eleanor Atwood (born November 18, 1939) is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, teacher, environmental activist, and inventor. Since 1961, she has published 18 books of poetry, 18 novels, 11 books of non-fiction, nine collections of short fiction, eight children's books, and two graphic novels, and a number of small press editions of both poetry and fiction. Atwood has won numerous awards and honors for her writing, including two Booker Prizes, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Governor General's Award, the Franz Kafka Prize, Princess of Asturias Awards, and the National Book Critics and PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Awards. A number of her works have been adapted for film and television. Atwood's works encompass a variety of themes including gender and identity, religion and myth, the power of language, climate change, and "power politics". Many of her poems are inspired by myths and fairy tales which interested her from a very early age. Oates, ...
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Matt Damon
Matthew Paige Damon (; born October 8, 1970) is an American actor, film producer, and screenwriter. Ranked among ''Forbes'' most bankable stars, the films in which he has appeared have collectively earned over $3.88 billion at the North American box office, making him one of the highest-grossing actors of all time. He has received various awards and nominations, including an Academy Award and two Golden Globe Awards, in addition to nominations for three British Academy Film Awards and seven Primetime Emmy Awards. Damon began his acting career in the film '' Mystic Pizza'' (1988). He continued acting in ''Courage Under Fire'' (1996) and '' The Rainmaker'' (1997). He gained prominence in 1997 when he and Ben Affleck wrote and starred in ''Good Will Hunting'', which won them the Academy and Golden Globe awards for Best Screenplay. He established himself as a leading man by starring as Tom Ripley in ''The Talented Mr. Ripley'' (1999), Jason Bourne in the ''Bourne'' franchise (200 ...
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Tommy Lee Jones
Tommy Lee Jones (born September 15, 1946) is an American actor and film director. He has received four Academy Award nominations, winning Best Supporting Actor for his performance as U.S. Marshal Samuel Gerard in the 1993 thriller film '' The Fugitive''. His other notable starring roles include Texas Ranger Woodrow F. Call in the television miniseries ''Lonesome Dove'', Agent K in the ''Men in Black'' film series, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell in ''No Country for Old Men'', Hank Deerfield in ''In the Valley of Elah'', the villain Two-Face in ''Batman Forever'', Mike Roark in the disaster film ''Volcano'', terrorist William "Bill" Strannix in ''Under Siege'', Texas Ranger Roland Sharp in '' Man of the House'', rancher Pete Perkins in ''The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada'' (which he also directed), Colonel Chester Phillips in '' Captain America: The First Avenger'', CIA Director Robert Dewey in ''Jason Bourne'', and Warden Dwight McClusky in ''Natural Born Killers''. He most recent ...
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Susan Meiselas
Susan Meiselas (born June 21, 1948) is an American documentary photographer. She has been associated with Magnum Photos since 1976 and been a full member since 1980. Currently she is the President of the Magnum Foundation. She is best known for her 1970s photographs of war-torn Nicaragua and American carnival strippers.Photographer Susan Meiselas on documenting women’s refuges
. Rachel Cooke, The Observer, 21 My 2017. Retrieved May 24, 2017
Meiselas has published several books of her own photographs and has edited and contributed to others. Her works have been published in newspapers and magazines including ''



Catherine Lord
Catherine Lord (born 1949) is an American artist, writer, curator, social activist, professor, scholar exploring themes of feminism, cultural politics and colonialism. In 2010, she was awarded the Harvard Arts Medal. Early life and education Born in Dominica, she attended a British boarding school in Barbados. When she was 13, she moved to Iowa with her family. While attending Radcliffe College, where she majored in English, she worked as a research assistant at the Schlesinger Library. She earned her Master's of Fine Arts degree in photography and the history of photography at the Visual Studies Workshop, an artists' organization allied with the State University of New York at Buffalo. Lord also edited Afterimage, a journal of photography, film, and video. Work Her work includes ''The Effect of Tropical Light on White Men'' and "text/image project". She edited the catalogue for an exhibition of lesbian art, "All but the Obvious". Curated work Lord has curated a number of ...
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John Ashbery
John Lawrence Ashbery (July 28, 1927 – September 3, 2017) was an American poet and art critic. Ashbery is considered the most influential American poet of his time. Oxford University literary critic John Bayley wrote that Ashbery "sounded, in poetry, the standard tones of the age." Langdon Hammer, chair of the English Department at Yale University, wrote in 2008, "No figure looms so large in American poetry over the past 50 years as John Ashbery" and "No American poet has had a larger, more diverse vocabulary, not Whitman, not Pound." Stephanie Burt, a poet and Harvard professor of English, has compared Ashbery to T. S. Eliot, calling Ashbery "the last figure whom half the English-language poets alive thought a great model, and the other half thought incomprehensible". Ashbery published more than 20 volumes of poetry and won nearly every major American award for poetry, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his collection ''Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror''. Renowned for ...
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Fred Ho
Fred Ho (; born Fred Wei-han Houn; August 10, 1957 – April 12, 2014) was an American jazz baritone saxophonist, composer, bandleader, playwright, writer and Marxist social activist. Biography He was born in Palo Alto, California,John Stevenson"Fred Ho: Baritone saxophonist whose innovative output was influenced by his social and environmental beliefs" ''The Independent'', May 30, 2014. and moved at the age of six with his family to Massachusetts. In 1988, he changed his surname to "Ho". While he is sometimes associated with the Asian-American jazz or avant-garde jazz movements, Ho himself was opposed to the use of term "jazz" to describe traditional African-American music because the word "jazz" had sometimes been used pejoratively by white Americans to denigrate the music of African Americans. Ho sought to define what constitutes Asian-American jazz: "What makes Chinese American music Chinese American? What would comprise an Asian American musical content and form that co ...
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