Simone Forti is a dancer, artist, writer based in Los Angeles. She came of age artistically in the 1960s, a time of rich dialog between poets, musicians, dancers and visual artists. Her early Dance Constructions were influential to the reinventing of dance in New York that happened in the 60s and 70s. Forti has collaborated extensively with musicians Peter Van Riper and Charlemagne Palestine, basing her dancing on studies of animals’ movements and on the dynamics of circling.

Since the early 1980s Forti has been doing News Animations, improvisational moving and speaking speculations on world events. Forti’s book Handbook in Motion was published in 1974 by the Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (distributed by the Contact Editions). Her book Oh, Tongue was edited and published by Fred Dewey for Beyond Baroque Books, in 2003.

Forti has performed internationally at venues including the Louvre Museum in Paris, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York that also features some of her work in its permanent collection. Forti is proud that in 2011 she received the Yoko Ono Lennon Courage Award for the Arts. She is represented by The Box Gallery, Los Angeles.

Works
Room 1. Simone Forti, Onion Walk, c. 1961
Room 2. Simone Forti, News Animation*
(Rehearsal), Getty Museum 8 May, 2004.
Camera: Mark Eby, Tony Arias,
9 minutes 47 seconds
*Plays every 15 minutes, starting on the hour.
Works courtesy the artist and The Box, Los Angeles.