- published: 09 Jun 2014
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Yvonne Rainer (born November 24, 1934) is an American dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker, whose work in these disciplines is regarded as challenging and experimental. Her work is sometimes classified as minimalist art. Rainer currently lives and works in California and New York.
Yvonne Rainer was born on November 24, 1934 in San Francisco, California. Rainer's parents, Joseph and Jeanette, considered themselves radicals. Her mother was of Polish-Jewish descent and her father of Italian ancestry. As a child, she was sent to live at Sunnyside, a boarding institution in Palo Alto, with her older brother Ivan for several years. Her parents visited them each Sunday in their 1938 Pontiac Sedan. By 1941, she moved back with her parents at the age of seven to a new house in the Sunset that she describes as "an unfamiliar neighborhood of white Protestant working class families." From the age of twelve, she had been "exposed to the heady commingling of poets, painters, writers, and Italian anarchists." She went to Lowell High, and after graduation, she attended San Francisco Junior College for a year, then Berkeley for a week. She dropped out of college by the end of September 1952.