Lee Reynolds Award - Ruth Mayleas
Ruth Mayleas’ career has encompassed work with major national and international arts funding and service agencies. For a decade in the eighties and early nineties she directed the Ford Foundation’s newly revitalized arts program which focused on the encouragement of cultural diversity, the development of new work in the performing arts, and the stabilization of minority arts institutions. Ford programs developed during her tenure included the first major national effort to strengthen the collections and management of black and Hispanic art museums, a joint choreographer-composer commissioning program, commissions for performing artists working in alternative and experimental forms, and support for new musical theatre. She was also extensively involved with Ford’s overseas cultural programs, particularly in India and Southeast Asia.
From 1966 to 1978 Ms. Mayleas headed the Theater Program of the National Endowment for the Arts. As its first director she built and shaped a national program that responded to the needs and aspirations of the not-for-profit professional theatre in the United States at a crucial period in its development. The policies and programs she developed over this period of time – working successively with Endowment Chairmen Roger Stevens and Nancy Hanks – identified and addressed such major concerns in the theatre as institutional stability, artistic quality, and increased accessibility.
Earlier in her career she was director of the American National Theatre and Academy’s national theatre service division, overseeing a program of information, services, and professional assistance to theatres throughout the country, providing facilitative and technical assistance to the developing not-for-profit professional theatre movement. Concurrently she headed the U.S. Centre of the International Theatre Institute, at the time the principal private agency engaged in international theatre communication and exchange.
She has represented the United States at numerous international arts conferences and seminars and participated in three American Assemblies concerned with the performing arts, the arts and public policy, and the arts and government. As an international arts consultant she worked with the India Foundation for the Arts, the first private philanthropic organization devoted to the arts on the subcontinent and, in 1997, with the World Bank in helping to set up its Cultural Fund which assisted major arts and cultural institutions in St. Petersburg, Russia.
She is a former vice president of the Theatre Communications Group and has served on the boards of Grantmakers in the Arts, the National Theatre Conference, the Women’s Project and Productions, and the League of Professional Theatre Women, among other organizations. She co-produced the League’s television series, WOMEN IN THEATRE, a unique interview program featuring notable women in the American theatre, seen on City University Television (Channel 75 in New York City); presently she is editor of the League’s annual publication, ROUNDUP, which she founded ten years ago.
Ms. Mayleas is the recipient of a Ford Foundation travel and study grant as well as awards from the National Theatre Conference, Dance Theatre Workshop, the Long Wharf Theatre, the League of Resident Theatres, the Women’s Project and Productions, and the League of Professional Theatre Women.