CalArts to Announce 2012 Alpert Awards Recipients, 5/11

The Herb Alpert Foundation and California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) will award the 18th Annual Alpert Award in the Arts to five exceptional mid-career artists. The award recognizes past performance and future promise to artists working in Dance, Film/Video, Music, Theatre and Visual Arts with a prize of $75,000. Herb Alpert, the legendary musician and artist who created the Herb Alpert Foundation with his wife Lani Hall and gave the first Alpert Award in the Arts in 1995 says, "The Alpert Awards are given to those who take aesthetic, intellectual and political risks, and challenge worn-out conventions. They're unafraid of the unknown."

Irene Borger, the Director of the Alpert Award in the Arts, selects the distinguished panelists for each of the Award's five disciplines.

The 2012 DANCE Award panelists:

Thomas DeFrantz – Choreographer, Dancer; Professor of African and African American studies and Dance, Duke University

Simone Forti - Dancer, Choreographer and Writer; Adjunct Professor, University of California, Los Angeles

Alma Guillermoprieto – Contributor, The New Yorker

The 2012 FILM/VIDEO Award panelists:

Romi Crawford - Director, Visiting Artists Program, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Ralph McKay - Program Advisor, International Film Festival Rotterdam; Marfa Film Festival

Esther Robinson - Film Director and Producer; Founder, ArtHome, Brooklyn, NY

The 2012 MUSIC Award panelists:

Derek Bermel - Clarinetist and Composer, Brooklyn, NY

Tania León - Distinguished Professor, Conservatory of Music; Composer and Conductor, City University of New York

David Wessel - Professor of Music; Director, Center for New Music and Audio Technologies, University of California, Berkeley

The 2012 THEATRE Award panelists:

Vanessa Gilbert - Adjunct Professor, Playwriting, Brown University

Daniel Alexander Jones - Head of the Playwriting Program; Acting and Theatre History Faculty, Fordham University

Kristin Marting - Artistic Director, HERE, New York

The 2012 VISUAL ARTS Award panelists:

Hannah B. Higgins - Professor, Art History, University of Illinois at Chicago

David Joselit - Carnegie Professor, History of Art, Yale University

Clara Kim - Senior Curator of Visual Arts, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

Over the years the distinguished Alpert Award panelists have selected a group of artists who have gone on to extraordinary careers after winning the Alpert Award including Zhou Long, 2011 Pulitzer Prize winner in Music, and Suzan-Lori Parks, a Pulitzer winner for Drama 2002. Four MacArthur Fellows and 22 Guggenheim Fellows have also received this prestigious award.

Initiated and funded by The Herb Alpert Foundation and administered by California Institute of the Arts, the Award rewards experimenters who are challenging and transforming art, their respective disciplines, and society.

For more information about the Awards, please visit: www.alpertawards.org and www.herbalpertfoundation.org.