Draft:Douglas Rosenberg

Douglas Rosenberg (born December 21, 1956) is an interdisciplinary American artist and theorist, working in performance, video, screendance, and installation whose work has been exhibited internationally for over 30 years. Additionally, he is well-known for his writing about art. Rosenberg is based in Madison, WI, where he is a Vilas Distinguished professor of Art at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.



Early life and education
Rosenberg grew up in San Anselmo, CA. He attended Redhill Junior High School where he was introduced to the possibilities of living a creative life by his first art teacher, Ted Allen. It was here that he began to work in clay. He subsequently attended Sir Francis Drake High School (now known as Archie Williams High School), where he was a part of an alternative program called "School Within A School" (SWAS). While attending SWAS, he learned about land art installations, wrote poetry, played trust games, experienced consciousness raising exercises, and made pottery while listening to folk music. This was an environment that was inspired by experimental learning communities of the 1970s, during the tumultuous era of the Vietnam war.

Upon graduating from high school in 1975, Rosenberg took a job as a house painter and later worked as a carpenter. In the same time period, he and a friend built a kiln in the backyard of the friend's family home, where they also set up a pottery studio in the basement. For the next few years he studied pottery with Thanos Johnson at The College of Marin in Kentfield, California, where he also took various art classes. During this time, he was introduced to the work of playwright Samuel Beckett through a community college production of "Waiting For Godot," an event that pushed him into thinking about art in a much larger context. Rosenberg began taking dance classes with a local choreographer, June Watanabe, which led to a series of collaborations in which he created scenic elements and ultimately video projections as part of live dance performances. He also began taking workshops in experimental theatre techniques with various teachers including Yoshi Oida who worked extensively with the director Peter Brook. In the early 1980s Rosenberg collaborated with a group of German artists who were associated with Joseph Beuys' Free International University. They arranged for Rosenberg to create a series of performances in and around Kassel, Germany that coincided with the 1982 Documenta where he encountered the work of numerous contemporary artists and worked as a volunteer on Joseph Beuys iconic 7,000 Oaks Project.

From 1983 to 1985 Rosenberg attended San Francisco Art Institute, where he received an MFA in Performance and Video (New Genres). There, he studied with Doug Hall, Paul Kos, Howard Fried, Linda Frye Burnham et al.

Life and work
Rosenberg lives in rural Wisconsin with his wife, choreographer Li Chiao-Ping, where they share a studio space he built for their respective practices. They often hold workshops and other creative gatherings on their property which was formerly a working farm. Rosenberg and Li have collaborated on various projects with their son, Jacob Li Rosenberg, an artist living in San Francisco.

Their inspiration for this space comes from Black Mountain College. Rosenberg's work is largely tied to the seasonal landscape and for ten years he and Li hosted Summerwork at the Farm, a project that was designed around the idea of seasonal farm work and community. It was a space for reflection, conversation, engagement, meditation on the landscape, art, and humanism.

As an advocate for a greater understanding for Jewishness and the Arts, Rosenberg founded the Conney Project on Jewish Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The Conney Project was an initiative that included conferences, symposia, and gathered scholars from around the world to engage in looking deeply at the contributions of Jewish artists and scholars to the narratives of 20th century art, literature, and culture. Under Rosenberg's leadership, the Conney Project ran for 18 years. While continuing to work in performance, video, and other time-based media, Rosenberg recently returned to working in his first medium, clay, in particular, the practice of Raku, which he had left some 40 years ago. His most recent clay project, Shevirah, is a poetic interpretation of the 16th century Kabbalist Rabbi Isaac Luria’s writing about the creation of the universe in which the divine light and energy of the world was contained in ten vessels, seven of which shattered, unable to contain the powerful energy of the universe. Rosenberg created the large scale monolithic black vessels which recall his earlier work with similar forms in the late 1970s.

Over the years Rosenberg's time-based performative work has addressed topics including forgiveness, identity, care, the transient nature of relationships, and meditations on death, aging, and the landscape around him. Rosenberg has also addressed similar concerns in his book of collected essays on art, Staring at the Sky: Essays on Art and Culture (Bokförlaget Korpen, 2024). Composed as an ongoing commitment to remaining mindful of the field and the cultural upheaval of the period, the essays were written as a weekly practice over a five-year period from 2015 to 2020, during which time he served as Chair of the Art Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Screendance
Rosenberg is well known for his work in screendance. He has articulated the field both through his films and his theoretical writing. Screendance is a type of interdisciplinary practice that sits at the intersection of media and bodies in motion, which has roots in the work of artists such as Maya Deren, Norman McLaren, and Amy Greenfield. Rosenberg is a founding editor of the International Journal of Screendance. He is the author of Screendance: Inscribing the Ephemeral Image and editor of The Oxford Handbook of Screendance Studies, which was awarded the Oscar G. Brockett Book Prize for Dance Research.

As a filmmaker, his work considers aging bodies, intimacy, community, and the specific site, in such work as, Song of Songs, 2021. He is well-known for his collaborations with choreographers including Molissa Fenley, Sean Curran, Ellen Bromberg, Joe Goode, Li Chiao-Ping, Eiko and Koma and others. His film My Grandfather Dances with choreographer Anna Halprin was awarded the Director’s Prize at the International Jewish Video Festival in Berkeley, California.

Screendance

 * Breathe, 1985
 * Bardo (In Extremis), 1997
 * My Grandfather Dances, 1998
 * Periphery, 2000
 * Grace, 2002
 * Mel-Wong (Excerpt from documentary The Men's Project), 2002
 * Residues, 2002
 * 9 Variations For Hilary, 2003
 * Hope, 2004
 * Of the Heart, 2008
 * Hallelujah with Annelise Charek, 2009
 * Circling, 2012
 * Here Now with Sally Gross, 2015
 * A Very Small Cinematic Gesture, 2017
 * Song of Songs, 2021

Video Art

 * Tempters Challenge, 1984
 * La Mecanique, 1987
 * Aria, 1988
 * The Solution, First Part: The Rhetoric of Power, 1993
 * Meditation (Labor), 2015

Video, Installation, and 2D Art

 * Dance Camera West, Redcat Theater, Los Angeles, CA, USA, June 5, 2009.
 * San Souci Festival, Boulder, CO, USA, September 20, 2013.
 * Numeridanse, Maison de la Danse, Lyon, France, February 6, 2013.
 * Dance on Camera Festival, Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center (Film at Lincoln Center), New York, NY, February 4, 2013.
 * Agite y Sirva, Festival Itinerante de Video Danza, Puebla, Mexico Nov. 4, 2013.
 * O.N.L.Y. Festival, in Birr, Ireland, Birr Theatre & Arts Centre, November 8th and 9th, 2013.
 * Circuit-Est, screening curated by Priscilla Guy, Montreal, Canada, 2013.
 * Cinedans, curated by Marion Poeth, Lumière Maastricht, Netherlands, 2013.
 * Lightmoves Festival of Screendance, Limerick, Ireland, Nov. 19-22, 2014.
 * InShadow - International Festival of Video, Lisbon, Portugal, April 20-24, 2014.
 * Public/Private Space, curated by Douglas Rosenberg, Gund Gallery at Kenyon College, USA, March 21-22, 2014.
 * Cinédanse, Montreal, Quebec, September 27, 2015.
 * Sans Souci Festival of Dance Cinema, Canyon Theater, Boulder, Colorado, November 9 & 16, 2015.
 * Lightmoves Festival of Screendance, Limerick Museum of Art, Ireland, November 2016.
 * Cine-Corps Film Festival, Paris, France, curated by Priscilla Guy, January 30-February 4, 2018.

Broadcast Television

 * Three Dance Films About Place, Aroma and Terrain, Wisconsin Public Television, July 21, 2007.
 * Aroma, BravoFACT Presents, Citytv Toronto, A-Channel Barrie in London and Ottawa, A-Channel Victoria, 2007.
 * Seven Solos, Documentary, Wisconsin Public Television, numerous broadcasts, 2011-2012.
 * Director’s Cut, interview, Wisconsin Public Television, August 3, 2011 and subsequent re-broadcasts, 2011-2012.

Selected lectures and panels

 * Rosenberg, Douglas (2008, April 9). Under the Skin [keynote speaker with Hope Mohr]. Medical Humanities Initiative, Susquehanna University.
 * Rosenberg, Douglas (2012, October). Witnessing dance: mediation and the technologies of representation [keynote speaker]. International Conference on Dance, Canada.
 * Rosenberg Douglas (2014). [workshop and keynote speaker]. Lightmoves Festival of Screendance, Limerick, Ireland.
 * Rosenberg, Douglas (2014, March 16). Inscribing the Ephemeral Image [lecture]. Cinedans festival, Eye Film Institute, Amsterdam.
 * Rosenberg, Douglas (2017). Surface Tensions: Screenic Bodies and the Sequential Moment [lecture as a visiting artist]. Yale School of Art.
 * Rosenberg, Douglas (2017). Hiding in Plain Site: Screendance Histories and the Expanded Imagination [inaugural lecture]. Stanford Colloquium on Dance Studies, Stanford University.
 * Rosenberg, Douglas (2018, October 13-15). [keynote speaker]. Jews and the Jewishness in the Dance World conference, Arizona State University.

Selected awards and grants

 * 1985 - SONY American Film Institute Award, National Video Festival.
 * 1994 - National Endowment for the Arts/Southeast Media Fellowship.
 * 1998 - Soros Foundation, Project on Death in America Fellowship, (co-recipient Ellen Bromberg).
 * 1998 - Isadora Duncan Award (IZZY) for Singing Myself a Lullaby, San Francisco Bay Area Dance Coalition.
 * 1999 - Director’s Prize, International Jewish Video Festival, Judah Magnes Museum, Berkeley, CA.
 * 2001 - National Endowment for the Arts Creation Grant, for support of Venous Flow, with choreographer Li Chiao-Ping.
 * 2002 - James D. Phelan Art Award in Video, sponsored by The San Francisco Foundation and funded by the James D. Phelan Trust.
 * 2003 - EMMY Nomination: National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, Outstanding Achievement for Entertainment Program, Single Entertainment Program of Series.
 * 2005/2006 - BravoFACT (Canadian Television) production grant, in collaboration with Allen Kaeja, for new dance film, AROMA.
 * 2016/2017 - MAP Fund Grant, with choreographer Li Chiao-Ping, supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation with additional funds from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, MAP is an affiliate program of Creative Capital, New York, NY.
 * 2018 - Brocket Book Prize for Dance Research, awarded by the Dance Studies Association for “The Oxford Handbook of Screendance Studies.”
 * 2023 - Creative Arts Award, University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of the Arts.
 * 2023/2024 - Honorary Award, Choreoscope, Barcelona Dance Film Festival.