American dancer and choreographer Mark Morris was BOTD in 1956. Born in Seattle, Washington to an artistic family, he studied flamenco dance as a child, joining the Koleda Folk Ensemble in his teens. After studying dance in Spain, he moved to New York City in 1976, working with choreographers including Eliot Felf, Lar Lubovich, Laura Dean and Hannah Kahn. In 1980, he launched the Mark Morris Dance Company, performing to great success at venues in New York. After winning a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1986, he received commissions to choreograph new works for major ballet companies. Known as the “bad boy of modern dance”, his work was noted for its humour and occasionally controversial subject matter, drawing from a range of international dance traditions. Unusually, his dance troupe included a number of established and older dancers, with Morris himself performing into his 60s. He established long working relationships with Russian ballet star Mikhail Baryshnikov, with whom he co-founded the White Oak Dance Project, and cellist Yo-Yo Ma, choreographing a dance piece to accompany Ma’s performance of Bach’s Cello Suite #3 for the documentary film Falling Down Stairs. In 1988, Morris was appointed resident choreographer at the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels, Belgium, creating some of his best-known productions, including L’Allegro, il penseroso ed il moderato, based on Handel‘s oratorio of the same name; a dance version of Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas, in which he danced the parts of Dido and the Sorceress; and The Hard Nut, a modern take on Tchaikovsky‘s dance suite The Nutcracker. Returning to the United States as a celebrity, he worked prolifically throughout the 1990s, choreographing five or six new works for his dance company every year, including a dance version of the Gertrude Stein-Virgil Thompson opera Four Saints in Three Acts, and created classical ballets for the American Ballet Theatre, the San Francisco Ballet and Les Grands Ballets Canadiens. In 2001, he opened the Mark Morris Dance Centre in Brooklyn, becoming the company’s first permanent home. In the 2010s, he combined choreographic work with conducting, leading performances at the Tanglewood Music Centre, the Lincoln Centre and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and served as musical director for the 2013 Ojai Music Festival in California. His memoir Out Loud was published in 2019. During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Morris choreographed short video dances for his company, including Water, a piece designed to be performed outdoors. Openly gay since forever, his current relationship status is unknown.