Yvonne Rainer

American film director, choreographer and dancer (born 1934) Yvonne Rainer (born November 24, 1934) is an American dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker, whose work in these disciplines is regarded as challenging and experimental. Her work is sometimes classified as minimalist art. Rainer currently lives and works in New York. Early life Yvonne Rainer was born on November 24, 1934, in San Francisco, California. Her parents, Joseph and Jeanette, considered themselves radicals. Her mother, a stenographer, was born in Brooklyn to Jewish immigrants from Warsaw, and her father, a stonemason and house painter, was born in Vallanzengo, northern Italy, and emigrated to the United States at the age of 21. Rainer grew up, along with an older brother, in the Sunset District of San Francisco, which she has described as "a neighborhood of white Protestant working class families". From the age of twelve, she was "exposed to the heady commingling of poets, painters, writers, and Italian anarchists". Throughout her childhood, her father took her to foreign films at the Palace of the Legion of Honor, while her mother took her to the ballet and opera. She attended Lowell High School, and after gradua