Biographical Note
Alan M. Kriegsman, known to many as "Mike," served as performing arts critic (music, dance, theater, film, television) for The Washington Post from 1966 until 1996, when he retired and was named Critic Emeritus. In addition to reviews, features, reportage and essays, he created a Sunday column called “Crosscurrents,” which ran for more than a decade.
In 1974, the Post appointed him to be the first full-time dance critic in the paper’s history. Two years later, in 1976, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism, the first time the award in the criticism category was given for writings about the art of dance. At the Post, he encouraged other critical voices, inviting more than a half dozen dance writers to work with him to write about the burgeoning dance activities in the nation’s capital.
His journalistic career began at The San Diego Union in 1960, where he served as the music, drama, and dance critic until 1965. In that year, he was named Assistant to the President of the Juilliard School in New York, where he edited the school publications, taught a criticism course, adjudicated scholarship and performance auditions and helped prepare for the school’s move to Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.
He served three terms as a member of the board of directors of the Dance Critics Association (DCA); numerous times as visiting faculty for the Critics Conference at the American Dance Festival; and as a member of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Visiting Committees on the Arts and Humanities. He was a member of the Leadership Group for the National Dance/Media Project at UCLA, and of the juries for the annual Pola Nirenska Award administered by the Washington Performing Arts Society. He also served on the boards of directors of the Merce Cunningham Dance Foundation, the Choo-San Goh and H. Robert Magee Foundation, and the Dance Institute of Washington. He served on four occasions as a member of the Pulitzer Prize jury in the music, criticism, and feature-writing categories.
Among other honors accorded him were a Metropolitan Area Mass Media award from AAUW in 1988 for his Washington Post appreciation of Fred Astaire; a Washington Review of the Arts award in 1979 for “outstanding writing on the new arts”; a 1995 Dance in the District award for “outstanding contributions” to the dance field in the Washington area; a 2002 Dance Metro DC award (which subsequently instituted an annual Alan M. Kriegsman Award for distinguished service) for his “inestimable contribution to the Washington area dance community over three decades”; and a 2003 Outstanding Service Award from the International Association of Blacks in Dance. In 2004, he was awarded the first special recognition Dance/USA Trustees Award for “his unique and significant contributions to dance journalism and American dance spanning the last third of the 20th century” with this tribute: “Of all critics, he has the keenest eye and deepest heart.” In March 2012, he and his wife, Sali Ann Kriegsman, were honored with the Pola Nirenska Award for Lifetime Achievement in Dance.
In 1995, he was one of eight American participants in an international symposium, convened in St. Petersburg, on Russian influences on 20th-century choreography, where he presented a paper on the career and dance works of Bronislava Nijinska. The paper was published posthumously in Dance View, Vol. 31, No.4 (Autumn 2014). In 1989 at Miami-Dade Community College, he lectured on “Balanchine and Music” at the Miami Balanchine Conference, which brought together Russian and American dance critics and scholars and former Balanchine principal dancers. At the national Dance Critics Association conference in Los Angeles in 1990, he co-designed and co-directed (with Gus Solomons, Jr.) the organization’s first Multicultural Scholarship Program in Dance Criticism.
Born February 28, 1928, in Brooklyn, New York, he was educated at New York City public schools (P.S. 39 and Far Rockaway High School), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Columbia University (B.S., magna cum laude, 1951; M.A. in musicology, 1953; and completion of doctoral requirements, 1959). During his service in the U.S. Army (1946-1947), he served in General Douglas MacArthur’s Honor Guard in Tokyo. He was a recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship in musicology at the University of Vienna in 1956-1957. He has taught arts subjects at Columbia, Barnard College, Hunter College, Juilliard, the University of California, the University of Minnesota, Harvard University, Temple University, George Washington University, American University, and the University of Maryland.
He married Sali Ann Ribakove on November 28, 1957. They resided in Chevy Chase, Maryland, from 1966 until his death, August 31, 2012.
In 2014, Dance Place, Washington, D.C. partnered with Sali Ann to create a living memorial offering time, space and housing to choreographers exploring a new idea/project: The Alan M. Kriegsman Creative Residency at Dance Place.
Sali Ann Kriegsman’s professional life has been devoted to artists and artistic legacies and to promoting greater appreciation and support for the arts. She has been a writer, critic, editor, advocate, funder, administrator, artistic director, producer, arts presenter, adviser, and teacher with not-for-profit public and private organizations and also independently.
She began working in dance in 1965 in New York City, as the administrator and sole staff of the American Dance Theater, the first professional modern dance repertory company, co-directed by Anna Sokolow and José Limón at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. She moved with her husband, Alan M. Kriegsman, to Washington, D.C., in 1966. She was executive editor at the American Film Institute (1969-1974), where she initiated a film book series in partnership with Little, Brown Co., managed the completion and publication of the first AFI Catalog of Motion Pictures (1961-1970), overseeing a cataloging team at the Library of Congress, and created a journal titled AFI Report, a forerunner of American Film. She also served as public relations director during AFI’s development of archives, education, training, and film presentation (AFI Theater) programs. During her tenure, AFI initiated a repertory film series first at the National Gallery of Art, then at L’Enfant Plaza, and then at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
As dance consultant to the Smithsonian Institution’s Division of Performing Arts (1979-83), she created a multi-year public program of performances, classes, lectures, and special events titled “The American Dance Experience,” in collaboration with area universities, libraries, and arts presenters. Among the innovative forms and artists she highlighted were jazz tap dancers and musicians, bringing attention to one of America’s innovative arts. She inventoried the Smithsonian’s dance resources and holdings and developed a proposal for a dance video series of historic recordings of American dance and dancers.
From 1986-1995, she served as director of the Dance Program at the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), overseeing approximately $100 million in grants during her tenure—the longest of any dance program director to that time. While there, she initiated two benchmark studies: the first assessment of the state of dance preservation and documentation, “Images of American Dance,” in partnership with the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (1991), which spurred the creation of the Dance Heritage Coalition, and the first study of the economic condition of choreographers titled “Dancemakers” (1993). She received a Distinguished Service Award from the NEA in 1989.
She left the Arts Endowment in 1995 to take up the post of executive director of Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival and School in Becket, Massachusetts (1995-98). There, as both artistic and executive director, she accelerated the expansion and organization of its archives, strengthening a program to re-house, safeguard and provide broad public access to the Festival’s historic materials. She further developed the Pillow’s mission and capacity, by linking the Pillow’s education, performance, archives, and commissioning programs. She initiated a multi-layered audience engagement program in which a team of distinguished scholars direct a variety of public programs to enhance public appreciation and knowledge of dance and related arts. She also initiated a collaborative dance project in Berkshire County with Williams College and a range of local organizations, to develop dance in underserved communities—bringing leading artists together with teachers, scholars and civic leaders, with support from a multi-year Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Arts Partners grant. In the wake of the decrease in NEA’s national funding and reach, she hosted a multi-year series of retreats and convenings for artists and presenters. During her tenure, she strengthened the Pillow’s programs while working with the board and staff to eliminate a $4.8 million debt and a deficit. The Pillow established its first cash reserve fund, produced its most financially successful benefit galas, and secured two $1 million foundation grants—the first in their history. Celebrating its 65th Anniversary in 1997 debt-free, the Pillow’s season ended with a surplus. She left Jacob’s Pillow financially secured, with a five-year organizational, financial, and artistic plan, the 1998 season programmed and an outstanding successor to take the helm.
From 1999-2000, in Washington, DC, Sali Ann Kriegsman served as president of the Dance Heritage Coalition, the national alliance of major dance archives and libraries. In that capacity she led a year-long National Dance Heritage Leadership Forum and the identification of the heritage agency's first list of America’s Irreplaceable Dance Treasures. Beginning in 2000, she served as an adviser on several independent projects. These include the Digital Dance Library Planning Project, an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-sponsored project to plan the first Digital Dance Library of moving images for educational access to dance’s heritage, and the steering committee for the National Tap Planning Process, administered by the International Tap Association.
Throughout her career, she has continued to write. Her articles, essays, and reviews have been published in journals, magazines, newspapers, reference books and online, and she has written criticism for a half-dozen periodicals. She co-authored with her husband, Alan M. Kriegsman, the major entry on “Dance” in the Dutton Dictionary of Contemporary Music (1974) and an article titled "The Unstudied Art," on dance and the humanities for Cultural Affairs (1969). In 2003, she was awarded a writer’s fellowship at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts to work on her first novel.
She co-chaired the Dance Critics Association’s international conference on reconstructions and revivals in 1982, and she has lectured in universities and schools, festivals, museums, and performing arts and community centers across the country and abroad. She co-directed with Marda Kirn the first Colorado Tap Festival (1986) and its major humanities component (funded by the Colorado Humanities Council), which led to the formation of the International Tap Association, and she was the progenitor for tap festivals in more than a dozen cities in the United States and internationally.
She has chaired and served on policy and grants panels for state, local, and federal agencies as well as numerous private foundations, both national and regional. She served on the board of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Arts (Mass MoCA), the Arts Academic Advisory Committee to the College Board, and she as a member of the UCLA National Dance/Media Project Leadership Group (1997-2000) and the steering committee for the American Assembly’s “The Arts, Technology and Intellectual Property” project (2000-2001). She was a contributor to the Center for Arts and Culture’s “Art, Culture and the National Agenda” project (2000-2001).
Her work for television includes being associate producer for a portrait of Charles “Honi” Coles on the MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour and the writer for Savion Glover: In Performance at the White House on PBS in 1998. She served for more than a decade on the board of Meredith Monk/The House Foundation. Her board service includes the Advisory Board of Day Eight.org and Honorary Member of the Pola Nirenska Awards Committee.
Among her honors is a Sage Cowles-endowed residency chair at the University of Minnesota in 1997 and the 1997 Flo-Bert Award with fellow honorees Donald O’Connor and Milt Hinton for her support of the art of tap dance. She received Oklahoma City University’s Preservation of Our Heritage – American Dance award in 1999, where a dance library room was named for her. In 2002, she received the Tap Preservation Award from the New York City Tap Festival. On May 25, 2006, National Tap Dance Day, she was honored by Savion Glover at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center for her contribution to tap dance history and on May 27, 2006, she received the Tradition in Tap Award for her outstanding achievements and significant contribution to the art and tradition of tap dance. In 2008, she gave the keynote address at the first conference devoted to Women in Tap at UCLA. In 2009, Dance/USA awarded her service with an Ernie, honoring “an individual whose achievements have significantly empowered artists and supported their creativity individually or as a community."
Sali Ann Kriegsman (née Ribakove) was born in New York City on April 16, 1936. She attended P.S. 39 and Far Rockaway High School. Her undergraduate studies were at Skidmore College, Queens College, and Columbia University. She has a master's degree in creative writing from Goddard College (1976). Prior to her work in dance, she was appointed Research Associate in the Department of Psychiatric Medicine at the Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation, La Jolla, California (1960-1965), where she co-authored professional medical journal articles.
Her biography is included in Who’s Who in America and Who’s Who of American Women.