During a recent conversation at The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, our visiting scholar Kristy Edmunds asked Philip Bither about making curatorial choices that lead to dynamic artistic experiences for audiences. Bither, Senior Curator of Performing Arts at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, explained, “A lot of it is based on passion; the rest of it is based on balance; questions of logistics; questions of what is relevant now; what’s needed now in our field.”
Bither oversees one of the country’s leading contemporary performing arts programs at the Walker Art Center, where he has been the William and Nadine McGuire Senior Curator of Performing Arts at since 1997. In 2011, he helped found the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance graduate program at Wesleyan University. He has served on the Board of Directors for the Jerome Foundation since 2009, and frequently speaks and writes about contemporary performing arts internationally.
Edmunds is the Center’s visiting scholar and is Executive and Artistic Director of the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA. Previously, she was the artistic director of the Melbourne Festival and the Park Avenue Armory in New York, Edmunds is recognized for innovation and depth in the presentation of works by contemporary artists, with a particular emphasis on contemporary performing arts. This conversation took place at the Center on March 30, 2015.
