ANNA HALPRIN broke boundaries in modern dance as the pioneer of post-modern dance, creating participatory, improvisational performance rooted in real life, ritual, and the wisdom of the body. She was the first in the western world to take dance off the stage and into the environment.  Her radical approach to exploration of the body and performance as deeply connected to nature became an essential aspect of her work and led to the groundbreaking Experiments in Environment workshops she co-led with her husband, Lawrence Halprin in the 1960’s initiating the exploration at the intersection of Dance and Design. She saw dance not just as performance, but as a way of healing and community-making. In1978, Anna made a transition from the San Francisco Dancers Workshop, co-founding Tamalpa Institute with Daria Halprin, to focus on the development of trainings in the work and expanding accessibility through public workshops.

LAWRENCE HALPRIN reimagined public space as a dynamic, lived experience: his landscapes and civic designs were deeply informed by human movement, emotion, and ecological systems. One of the first to conceptualize design thinking as a methodology, he developed the RSVP Cycles, a creative framework for his own environmental designs and integrated into choreography, therapeutic work and as a tool for multidisciplinary art making and communication process.