LAURA KUHN – Executive Director, the John Cage Trust

Laura Kuhn enjoys a lively career as a writer, performer, scholar, and arts administrator. In 1986, upon completion of her M.A. degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, she began working with the American composer, poet, visual artist, and philosopher John Cage in New York on a variety of large-scale projects, including his six “mesostic” lectures written for Harvard University as holder of the Charles Eliot Norton Chair in Poetry (Harvard University Press, 1990). Upon Cage’s death in 1992, she worked with Merce Cunningham, Anne d’Harnoncourt, and David Vaughan to found the John Cage Trust, which she continues to serve as Executive Director. In this capacity, she travels extensively, lecturing, and conducting performance workshops.

In 2007, the Cage Trust went into residence at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson New York, and Kuhn became the first John Cage Professor of Performance Arts. In celebration, she directed a staged version of Cage’s politically prescient Lecture on the Weather, with a cast including Cunningham, Jasper Johns, John Ashbery, Leon Botstein, John Ralston Saul, John Kelly. Kuhn is currently working with the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Ken Silverman on The John Cage Correspondence Collection for Wesleyan University Press (2012).