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Festival Biographies
Laura Kuhn
Laura Kuhn enjoys a lively career as writer, performer, scholar and arts administrator. During her graduate school years in the early 1980s, she worked with the Russian-born enfant terrible of musicology Nicolas Slonimsky, becoming successor editor of his acclaimed music dictionaries Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians and Music Since 1900. From 1986, she worked with John Cage in New York on a variety of large-scale projects, including his Europeras 1 & 2 for the Frankfurt Opera, for which she designed costumes and created stage actions. This work became the subject of her 1992 doctoral dissertation from the University of California at Los Angeles (John Cage's Europeras 1 & 2: The Musical Means of Revolution). Upon Cage's death in 1992, along with Cage's long-time friends and associates Merce Cunningham, Anne d'Harnoncourt and David Vaughan, Ms. Kuhn founded the John Cage Trust, now in residence at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson in New York, which she continues to direct and where she serves as the first John Cage Professor of Performance Art. In 2012, she curated her first-ever exhibition, Cage's Satie: Exhibition for Museum, for the Musée d'art contemporain de Lyon. She is currently putting the finishing touches on The Selected Letters of John Cage, scheduled for publication by Wesleyan University Press in 2016.