Background
Born in New York City in 1956, Sasha Anawalt grew up the daughter of a painter and arts school founder, Francis Cunningham and dance critic Kitty Cunningham.
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Sasha Anawalt
Edit Profilecritic professor author arts journalist
Education
McGill University; Barnard College.
Career
She is author of “The Joffrey Ballet: Robert Joffrey and the Making of An American Dance Company” (Scribner,1996). Her maternal grandfather, Hobart Ames Spalding, was instrumental in the formation of the Opera Society of Washington and the Washington Opera beginning in 1957 and worked with Igor Stravinsky, Gian Carlo Menotti and Alberto Ginastera. By 1976, Anawalt was writing about dance for the SoHo Weekly News and Montreal Gazette, and had created The Weekly, an arts supplement for her college newspaper at McGill University in Montreal.
After transferring to Barnard College in 1977 and marrying William B. Anawalt, she moved to Southern California in 1982 and started working as a theater reporter for the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner.
Foreign the next four years, Anawalt reviewed dance in mini-malls, church basements, gymnasiums and on the Los Angeles streets, giving dancers and performances in these unconventional venues as much attention as those in the city’s established concert halls and bastions of official culture. Anawalt wrote about dance, theater and television for numerous publications, including the New York Times, and served as dance critic for National Public Radio’s affiliate in Santa Monica, KCRW, for a dozen years beginning in 1984, as well as for the Los Angeles Weekly (1997-1999).
In 1996, her cultural biography “The Joffrey Ballet: Robert Joffrey and the Making of an American Dance Company” was published by Scribner. The book stayed on the Los Angeles Times’ bestseller list for two weeks and inspired a feature-length documentary film by Bob Hercules in 2012, “Joffrey: Mavericks of American Dance” that was shown on Public Broadcasting Service American Masters.
In 2001, Anawalt joined University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism to build the University of Southern California Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Program.
An arts journalism fellowship program that immersed international journalists in the Los Angeles arts scene and lasted until November 2013, it spawned both the National Education Association Arts Journalism Institute in Theater and Musical Theater and the Master’s Program in Specialized Journalism (the Arts) at University of Southern California Annenberg. Anawalt is founding director of all three programs, known for their innovative Engine series of popular-up newsrooms and laboratories (Engine28, Engine29, Engine30 and Engine31 ) designed with Douglas McLennan to figure out new models for arts journalism at a time of technological change. Anawalt continues to direct and teach as an associate professor in the Master of Arts program of arts journalism, a partnership with the five arts schools at the University of Southern California in Los Los Angeles
In 2009, Anawalt resigned from the Pasadena, California
Arts and Culture Commission after the commission refused to display two pieces of public art Anawalt served on the Pulitzer Prize jury panel for criticism in 2006 and 2007.
Achievements
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Born
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Nationality
United States