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John Bernd
1953–1988
New York Times obituary for John Jeffery Bernd, September 1, 1988:
John Jeffery Bernd, an experimentalist choreographer and dancer and an associate director of Performance Space 122, died of AIDS at New York University Hospital. He was 35 years old and lived in Manhattan.
Mr. Bernd helped develop a recent choreographic style in which autobiographical storytelling is blended with movement. One of his best known pieces, the 1981 ''Surviving Love and Death,'' was made the year he contracted AIDS, and deals with his illness. He began performing his own work in 1978 and received a Bessie, the New York Dance and Performance Award, in 1986.
Mr. Bernd also appeared in the dance and theater works of Meredith Monk, Jane Comfort, Jeff Weiss and Molissa Fenley, and he collaborated on dance-theater projects with Anne Bogart, Beth Lapides, Fred Holland, Ishmael Houston-Jones and Tim Miller. Known for his drawing together of choreographers and dancers working on the Lower East Side, Mr. Bernd also organized Open Movement, a weekly improvisation workshop held at Performance Space 122.
John Bernd Video Archive at The New York Public Library Digital Collections:
John Bernd Papers and Archive at Harvard Theatre Collection:
https://hollisarchives.lib.harvard.edu/repositories/24/resources/1397
