Anna and Lawrence Halprin are the hidden designers of public life in San Francisco. As the Bay Area’s most famous and under-explored artistic couple, this dancer and landscape architect duo transformed the city into a theatrical stage beginning in the rebellious 1960s. Larry designed signature outdoor spaces that help define the city’s identity, including the Ghirardelli Square adaptive-reuse project, Levi’s Plaza, and Letterman Digital Arts Center in the Presidio. Anna made the city streets her stage, presenting offbeat events like Blank Placard Dance, a 1967 protest performed by dancers carrying blank placards along Market Street, and Hangar, a performance staged by dancers trespassing on San Francisco Airport under construction the 1950s. The Halprins were teachers as much as artists. In the 1970s, working from her Divisadero Street studio, Anna built one of the nation’s first racially diverse dance companies. In the early 1980s, she created the first dance groups for HIV-positive men, based at Fort Mason.
 

About Janice Ross

Janice Ross is Professor Emerita of the Theatre and Performance Studies Deptartment, Stanford University. She is the author of five books, and focuses on the politics of moving bodies. She has researched and written about the Halprins for years. This talk is drawn from her latest book, The Choreography of Environments: How the Anna and Lawrence Halprin Home Transformed Contemporary Dance and Urban Design (Oxford, 2025), which explores how the architecture of the Halprins’ mid-century modern home in Marin shaped the art they put into the world.