This event is open to members of The University Seminars community only. Registration is required.
TANNENBAUM LECTURE
“Arthur Mitchell: The Extraordinary Life of Harlem’s Ballet Visionary”
Lynn Garafola
Professor Emerita of Dance at Barnard College
Born in 1934 to parents who came to Harlem during the Great Migration, Arthur Mitchell fell in love with ballet as a teenager and against all odds became New York City Ballet’s first African American star. Like Jackie Robinson and other civil rights heroes, Mitchell stood on the front line of integration, even as he left a lasting mark on ballets such as Agon and A Midsummer Night’s Dream by George Balanchine that defined a new era in American dance. Outraged by the assassination of Martin Luther King at the height of the Black Arts Movement, in 1969 Mitchell founded Dance Theatre of Harlem, the first enduring majority-Black company. Under Mitchell’s inspired direction, DTH quickly became a racial and artistic change-maker, enabling large numbers of Black dancers to pursue a professional career in ballet for the first time, even as the company became the incubator of ballets that spoke directly to the Black experience. Mitchell seldom spoke of the racism he had encountered, his closeted life as a gay man, or the toll that DTH took on his private and professional life. Heroic, mercurial, and complex, he was a larger-than-life figure, blessed by higher powers to remake his chosen art.
Lynn Garafola is Professor Emerita of Dance at Barnard College, Columbia University. A historian and critic, she is the author of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Legacies of Twentieth-Century Dance, and La Nijinska: Choreographer of the Modern; editor of José Limón: An Unfinished Memoir, The Diaries of Marius Petipa, and other books, and curator of several exhibitions, including Dance for a City: Fifty Years of the New York City Ballet, New York Story: Jerome Robbins and His World, and Arthur Mitchell: Harlem’s Ballet Trailblazer. A former Getty Scholar and recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, she has just completed her second biography, Arthur Mitchell: The Extraordinary Life of Harlem’s Ballet Visionary, scheduled for publication by Yale University Press in September 2026.
TANNENBAUM-WARNER AWARD
For distinguished scholarship and exceptional service to The University Seminars
David Johnston
Professor of Political Philosophy at Columbia University
David Johnston has taught at Columbia since 1986, specializing in political philosophy and the history of moral and political ideas. He has served as President of the New York State Political Science Association and as Chair of the International Conference for the Study of Political Thought as well as several leadership roles within Columbia. His books include The Rhetoric of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes and The Politics of Cultural Transformation; The Idea of a Liberal Theory; and A Brief History of Justice. He is editor of a selection of readings on Equality; co-editor, with Nadia Urbinati and Camila Vergara, of Machiavelli on Liberty and Conflict; editor and translator of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan: A Norton Critical Edition, 2nd ed. and (most recently) of Hobbes’s Leviathan: A Norton Library Edition. His current research focuses on the role of the idea of individual autonomy in modern political/economic/social imaginaries.
This event is open to seminar chairs, members, rapporteurs & friends of The University Seminars.