Meredith Monk Wins Religion and the Arts Award

Meredith Monk will be honored at this year’s Annual Meeting as the recipient of the 2013 Religion and the Arts Award. Established in 2007, the award is presented annually to an artist, performer, critic, curator, or scholar who has made a recent significant contribution to the understanding of the relations among the arts and religions, both for the academy and a broader public.

Monk's performance and vocal work has engaged, provoked, settled, and stirred audiences around the world and across the past five decades. Conjuring Joan of Arc and Hildegaard of Bingen, sacred spaces and liturgical performance, the state of the environment and the nature of impermanence, Monk's work resituates our sense of hearing and ultimately our sense of being. She gracefully moves between the realms of "religion and the arts," and has suggested, "Hopefully what you're doing as an artist is bodhisattva practice. It's the same thing; there's no separation at all.” Monk is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation grant, Guggenheim Fellowships, Obies, and several Honorary Doctor of Arts degrees. She was named "Composer of the Year" by Musical America in 2012. Her latest work, "On Behalf of Nature," is a Buddhist-inspired poetic meditation on nature and the human relation to it.

This award is selected by the Religion and the Arts Award Jury: Diane Apostolos-Cappadona, Mia Mochizuki, Christopher Parr, S. Brent Plate (Chair), and Pamela Winfield.

Please join us at the AAR Annual Meeting in Baltimore for a conversation with Meredith Monk on Sunday, November 24, 2013, from 3:00 p.m.–4:30 p.m. She will be interviewed by Diane Apostolos-Cappadona of Georgetown University, and Ann Pellegrini of New York University. The conversation, sponsored by the Religion and the Arts Award Jury, will be held in the Baltimore Convention Center, room 332.