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UCLA’s Glorya Kaufman Hall to Open in Fall 2004

New Home for Department of World Arts and Cultures Made Possible
by Major Gift to Dance

In November 1999, philanthropist and arts patron Glorya Kaufman donated $18 million toward the renovation of UCLA’s historic Dance Building, to be renamed Glorya Kaufman Hall. The gift was the largest single donation to the dance art form in America and at the time was the largest gift to UCLA outside of the health sciences. The building is the home of the Department of World Arts and Cultures.

The Dance Building, constructed in 1932, was badly damaged in the 1994 Northridge earthquake. Renovation began in 2001, and classes will begin in December 2004, with an open house and public celebration for Glorya Kaufman Hall scheduled for March 10-12, 2005.

Costs of the building’s basic structural and code improvements are being funded by a combination of State, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and campus resources. The gift from Glorya Kaufman is being used to enhance and expand the programmatic features of the building. The total cost of the project is $35 million.

UCLA has benefited from Kaufman’s philanthropy for more than 20 years. Her gifts have ranged from dance scholarships to underwriting tango performances at Royce Hall. Kaufman’s commitment to giving extends, as well, to other areas, including mental health, pediatric AIDS and laser research. Her altruism also led to the rebuilding of the Brentwood Branch Public Library, which, when completed in 1994, was dedicated to her late husband, Donald Bruce Kaufman.

World Arts and Cultures at UCLA

Glorya Kaufman Hall serves as the academic center for UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures (WAC), which is part of the School of the Arts and Architecture at UCLA (UCLArts). The Department was created in 1995 by the merger of the World Arts and Cultures program and UCLA’s Dance Department, the first university-based dance department in the country. The department is home to a diverse faculty of artists and scholars, drawn from a range of disciplines, including anthropology, folklore, dance, theater and performance studies. The department’s lively interdisciplinary curriculum is unified around a set of shared concerns: the significance of cultural and aesthetic diversity, both locally and worldwide; the meaning of tradition in contemporary societies; and the changing roles and responsibilities of artists.


World Arts and Cultures is an ideal environment for artists, scholars and activists interested in exploring the meaning of creative expression in the contemporary world and for dancers and choreographers seeking to expand and challenge the cultural, intellectual and political horizons of their own practice.

Undergraduate and graduate degrees are offered in world arts and cultures, cultural studies, culture and performance, dance and for community service work in the arts. Core faculty include professors Judith Baca, Donald J. Cosentino, Irma Dosamantes-Beaudry, Susan Foster, Michael Owen Jones, Judy Mitoma, Peter Nabokov, Allen F. Roberts, David Roussève (chair), Marta Savigliano, Peter Sellars and Christopher Waterman; associate professors David Gere, Angelia Leung, Victoria Marks and Colin Quigley; and assistant professor Cheng-Chieh Yu. In addition to its core faculty, WAC plays host to an impressive and constantly shifting array of visiting faculty.

UCLArts

Artists, architects, dancers, designers, musicians and scholars come to the School of the Arts and Architecture at UCLA to draw on its unique curriculum, which interweaves work in performance, studio and research studies, providing them with a solid creative, artistic and intellectual foundation as well as a liberal arts education from one of the country’s finest research universities. Our students gain a global view of the arts while integrating contemporary practice and theory in their chosen discipline.

Providing a full range of course offerings and degree programs, the School is comprised of six degree-granting units—Architecture and Urban Design, Art, Design | Media Arts, Ethnomusicology, Music, and World Arts and Cultures; two centers—the Center for Intercultural Performance and the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts; two museums—the Hammer and the Fowler; and a major performing arts program, UCLA Live.

UCLA

As a major research university, UCLA explores a broad range of subjects essential to creating real world advances in health care, education, science, commerce, the arts and culture, scholarship and community service. The wealth of cultural treasures and programs—museums and concert halls, theaters and dance studios, galleries and sculpture gardens, libraries and archives—makes UCLA a leading arts and cultural center of the West and the flagship arts campus of the UC system.