Rachel Cooper

Rachel Cooper has been Associate Director for Performing Arts and Public Programs at Asia Society since June 1998 and was Assistant Director for Performing Arts and Public Programs since December 1996. She has extensive experience in the presentation of traditional and contemporary Asian performing arts and the development of interdisciplinary programs which provide historical and cultural context for the stage presentations. She is currently producing a theater work commissioned by Asia Society, the Walker Art Center, Festival d’Automne a Paris and Theater Hebbel entitled Forgiveness, featuring artists from China, Korea, Japan, and the United States. She has developed an eighteen-month commissioning/residency project which was awarded a 1997 Meet the Composer International Collaborations grant involving Chinese-born, New York-based artists Yin Mei (choreographer), Xu Bing (installation/conceptual artist) and Indonesian composer Tony Prabowo. She also researched and developed the Society’s Festival of Song: Vocal Music of India and Pakistan, a series of concerts, lecture-demonstrations, and symposia, which took place from fall 1997 to spring 1998.

From 1995-96, Cooper was Associate Director of the UCLA Center for Intercultural Performance, where she assisted in establishing the center and implemented Phase One of the Asia Pacific Performance Exchange project. In this capacity, she worked with performing artists from China, Bangledesh, Vietnam, India and Indonesia. From 1993-95, Ms. Cooper was the assistant director for Media and Performing Arts in Asia Society’s Department of Media and Performing Arts. She organized New York-based programs and national tours which focused on the arts of India, Korea, China and Thailand. From 1988-1993, she directed the Festival of India’s performing arts program, which brought twelve traditional and contemporary companies to the United States. She has worked as an advisor on several television documentary programs, the eight-part PBS series DANCING, which focused on the role of dance around the world; and Distant Lives, a PBS documentary on Balinese music and dance.

Ms. Cooper is the founder and former director of the Balinese music and dance organization Sekar Jaya, which has been presenting the arts of Bali in the United States since 1979. Ms. Cooper did her undergraduate and graduate work at UCLA in Ethnic Arts and Dance Ethnology. She is the recipient of the Isadora Duncan award, a Rockefeller grant for choreography, and the Clifton F. Webb award for film.