About Lucinda Childs

Lucinda Childs, born in 1940, began her career as a choreographer in 1963 as a member of the seminal Judson Dance Theater. She formed her own company in 1973 and has since created more than fifty solo and ensemble works. Three years later, she was featured in the landmark avant-garde opera Einstein on the Beach by Philip Glass and Robert Wilson, for which she won an Obie Award. In 1977, she and Wilson co-directed and performed in I Was Sitting on My Patio This Guy Appeared I Thought I Was Hallucinating, which they revived for the Festival d’Automne in Paris in 2021, where they also created an evening-length work titled Bach 6 Solo with violinist Jennifer Koh.

In 1979, Childs choreographed one of her most enduring works, Dance, with music by Philip Glass and film décor by Sol LeWitt, for which she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Dance toured internationally and has been added to the repertory of the Lyon Opera Ballet, for which she has also choreographed Beethoven’s Grande Fugue. In 2015, she revived Available Light, created in 1983 with music by John Adams and a split-level set by Frank Gehry, for the Festival d’Automne in Paris. Available Light was presented at the Mostly Mozart Festival in New York in 2018, and that same year Childs’s company performed some of her early work as part of the exhibition Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Since 1981, Childs has choreographed more than thirty works for major ballet companies. She has also directed and choreographed a number of contemporary and eighteenth-century operas. Her productions include Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice for the Los Angeles Opera; Mozart’s Zaide, Stravinsky’s Le Rossignol and Oedipus Rex, Vivaldi’s Farnace, and John Adams’s Dr. Atomic for the Opéra national du Rhin in Strasbourg; Handel’s Alessandro at the Megaron Concert Hall in Athens; productions for La Monnaie in Brussels; and Jean-Baptiste Lully’s Atys and Jean-Marie Leclair’s Scylla and Glaucus for Theater Kiel in Germany. In 2020, she directed and choreographed Philip Glass’s Akhnaten for Opéra Nice Côte d’Azur, with Childs appearing as the narrator on film. The premiere was streamed in November 2020, with live performances in Nice in November 2021, and the production received the 2021 trophy for Best Lyrical Production from Opera Forum readers. Most recently, Childs directed and choreographed Philip Glass’s Satyagraha for Opéra Nice Côte d’Azur, which premiered in November 2025.

Childs has also collaborated with Robert Wilson on Letter to a Man, based on Nijinsky’s diaries and performed by Mikhail Baryshnikov. She appeared as an actor in Wilson’s productions of Heiner Müller’s Quartett and Marguerite Duras’s Maladie de la Mort with Michel Piccoli. In 2016, in an exhibition titled Nothing Personal, Childs’s choreographic scores were shown at the Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery in collaboration with the Centre national de la danse, to which she has donated her archive.

Childs holds the rank of Commandeur in France’s Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In 2017, she received the Golden Lion award from the Venice Biennale and the Samuel H. Scripps/American Dance Festival Award for Lifetime Achievement. She has been inducted into the Hall of Fame of the National Museum of Dance in Saratoga Springs, New York, and received an honorary doctorate from the Université Côte d’Azur in 2021. In 2022, she received a Dance Magazine Award.

Childs continues to create, perform, and reimagine her repertory internationally. Recent projects include Lucinda Childs x 100 (2023), created with the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris, and Four New Works (2024), bringing together new choreography and reconsiderations of earlier material. In 2026, Childs began a five-year appointment as Resident Choreographer of Gibney Company, encompassing new creation, repertory, education, and legacy. Her current work with the company, Another Look (2027), returns to Philip Glass’s Another Look at Harmony, Part IV, extending an artistic conversation that began fifty years ago with Einstein on the Beach.  Childs is also creating Path 19, a new work for the Paris Opera Ballet set to music by Max Richter, which will premiere at the Palais Garnier on December 4, 2026, as part of the program Pulsations. Childs is creating Path of Miracles (2028) a new work for Sara Mearns set to music by Jody Talbot performed live by a full orchestra conducted by Nigel Short.

Lucinda Childs founded her company in New York in 1973, following her work with Judson Dance Theater. During the 1970s, the company became the setting in which she developed a body of ensemble work based on precise pathways, repeated phrases, and changing spatial relationships among dancers. In 1979, the company premiered Dance, created with music by Philip Glass and film décor by Sol LeWitt. In 1983, Childs created Available Light with music by John Adams and a set by Frank Gehry. These works expanded the scale of the company’s activity and established a pattern of close collaboration with artists working in music, film, architecture, and visual art.

As Childs’s work expanded to include commissions for major ballet companies and opera productions, the company continued to perform and return to earlier repertory. In 2021, Lucinda Childs Dance Company presented Dance at The Joyce Theater in New York. In 2024, at Kampnagel in Hamburg, Childs created Four New Works for the company: Actus, Geranium, Timeline, and Distant Figure. The program brought newly made choreography into relation with earlier material and with music by Johann Sebastian Bach, Hildur Guðnadóttir, and Philip Glass, as well as a collaboration with artist Anri Sala. Four New Works subsequently toured in Europe in 2024 and 2025.

In March 2026, the company presented Early Works in the Guggenheim Museum rotunda as part of Works & Process, returning to pieces created between 1963 and 1978, including Pastime, Calico Mingling, Reclining Rondo, Radial Courses, and Katema. In June 2026, Lucinda Childs: Momentary Reprise at Bard SummerScape placed recent work alongside repertory from other periods of Childs’s career, including Actus, Geranium, an excerpt from Available Light, Field Dance 2 from Einstein on the Beach, and Distant Figure. More than fifty years after its founding, Lucinda Childs Dance Company has served as a setting for both new choreography and the return of earlier work, connecting Childs’s recent practice with structures she began developing with the company in the 1970s.