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National Council on the Arts Members

Gordon Davidson (Los Angeles, CA)

Gordon Davidson is Artistic Director of the Center Theatre Group/Mark Taper Forum of the Los Angeles County Music Center, and is also in his tenth year as Producing Director of CTG/Ahmanson Theatre's subscription season. For 32 years Mr. Davidson has guided hundreds of productions to the Taper stage while overseeing special projects sponsored by the Taper. This work and his direction of many of the Taper plays have been acclaimed both in Los Angeles and New York, garnering the Taper a Tony Award for theatrical excellence in 1977. More recently, the Taper received in consecutive years the Pulitzer Prize in Drama (a first for plays produced outside of New York) for The Kentucky Cycle and Angels in America (Part One - Millennium Approaches). When subsequently produced on Broadway, Angels in America also received in two consecutive years the Tony Award for Best Play for Part One and Part Two “ Perestroika, respectively. Some of the many Taper world premieres Mr. Davidson has directed include the Tony Award-winning Children of a Lesser God, the Pulitzer Prize-winning and Tony Award-winning The Shadow Box (for which he received a Tony Award for direction) and The Trial of the Catonsville Nine (Obie Award for Direction). His staging of Leonard Bernstein's Mass opened the John F. Kennedy Center.

Mr. Davidson, a former president of Theatre Communications Group and the League of Resident Theatres, has served on advisory panels for the National Endowment for the Arts. Currently, he is an artistic advisor for the Fund for New American Plays and a member of the advisory board for Cornell Center for the Performing Arts and the National Foundation for Jewish Culture. Recently, he was inducted as a member into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Born in Brooklyn, Mr. Davidson received a B.A. from Cornell University (1956) and an M.A. in directing from Western Reserve University (1957). Mr. Davidson also has honorary doctorates from Brooklyn College, California Institute of the Arts, and Claremont University Center.