A visual biography of Martha Graham

View a gallery of vintage photos of Martha Graham's performances

Graham's choreography was as visual as it was physical, complemented by the modernist set design of Isamu Noguchi. That's on display in this collection of artful photos from classic productions of shows like "Night Journey" and "Appalachian Spring."

Martha Graham's revolutionary approach to choreography

The dancer and choreographer created a uniquely American form of ballet that brought together stories from the country's history, abstract expressionism, modern psychological ideas, and collaborations with other major artists.

How Martha Graham challenged ballet's rigidity

Ballet prized lightness, but Graham's choreography emphasized weight. This essay explores how her work broke from European influences to embrace American idioms, much as her American contemporaries in jazz and literature did.

Listen to the last-known interview with Martha Graham

Reporter Michael Small interviewed the influential choreographer and dancer in 1989 for People magazine, two years before she died, and features the 95-year-old looking back on her life and career. If you want to skip ahead to the raw audio, jump to 26:40.

Watch Martha Graham perform 'Heretic'

The 1929 piece features Graham in white, expressively dancing on her own, flanked by 12 dancers in black who follow a more rigid choreography. Some critics have argued the piece was an allegory for Graham's rebellion against ballet's strict traditions.

The Martha Graham Technique, explained

It's considered the first codified modern dance technique and a foundational pillar of American dance. In this 1975 instructional film, its namesake explains how the Graham Technique works. "As you can see," she notes, "the body is capable of almost endless variations and combinations once it is trained."

A step-by-step guide to the Martha Graham Technique

This BBC explainer walks you through Martha Graham's famous approach to dance, offering you six moves you can work into your exercise regiment—or Graham-inspired routine.

Martha Graham on preparation and discipline

This clip from the 1957 documentary "A Dancer's World" features the dancer explaining why she's committed all of her energy to her art. "Spontaneity … is something arrived at over years and years of training," she says, "it is not a mere chance."

Listen to an interview with Martha Graham from 1974

This interview, from the "Bernard Gabriel Views the Music Scene" program, features a candid conversation in which Graham discusses how her career did not take off until her 30s and how she learned to ignore criticism.

Exploring Martha Graham's 'love of the body'

The innovative choreographer encouraged her dancers to tune into their bodies' natural movements. According to Dr. Kimerer L. LaMothe, author of "What the Body Knows," that kind of mindfulness made them better able to communicate a piece's symbolic meaning.

How the Martha Graham Company experiments with technology

The dance company was the first major group to livestream rehearsals and has collaborated with Google on a version of Graham's "Lamentation" that superimposes past performances on the present-day dancer.

Watch Martha Graham perform 'Lamentation,' an influential piece on grief

Graham choreographed and performed the piece about grief, which premiered in 1930. The dance is performed while seated, with Graham's character attempting to free herself from an all-encompassing purple jersey.

The Martha Graham Dance Company was the first integrated Broadway dance company

In 1951, Graham hired Mary Hinkson and Mattie Tierney, two Black dancers who started in the company's dance corps and eventually took on lead roles in productions. The move broke color barriers that were the norm for the time.

American dance legend Martha Graham, sometimes called 'the Picasso of dance,' refused to perform at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin and conceived the piece 'Chronicle' in response to the experience.

Unpacking 'Night Journey,' Martha Graham's take on a Greek myth

The dance piece was inspired by the story of Oedipus, as well as by more contemporary psychoanalytic theories from Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. This JSTOR article explores how Graham's show merged those texts with her singular approach to movement to explore gender and identity.

Watch Helen Keller visit Martha Graham's studio

The two women were friends, and Keller eventually visited Graham's studio while her company was rehearsing. In this footage of that encounter, Graham shows Keller the shape of her choreography.

Martha Graham's philosophy of creativity

The influential choreographer and dancer once said that creative people will never be satisfied with their work. Instead, "There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others."

A 3-minute look at Gandhi’s life, activism, and global influence

This video traces how a single incident launched Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent campaign against British rule, helping end the Raj. Archival images and footage show how his methods later shaped leaders like Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr.

Georgia O’Keeffe is one of the most significant modern artists in American history

Known for her distinct style and outsider persona, O’Keeffe is a key figure in US art history and one of the few female artists to have a dedicated museum. Read her biography to learn more about how her rural upbringing led to her eventual worldwide fame.

Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham keeps a public archive of his insightful essays

In addition to cofounding Y Combinator and other companies before it, Paul Graham is a prolific writer and artist. He chronicled many of his thoughts while building Y Combinator in a series of dozens of candid essays, all of which you can read in an online archive.

A history of Bauhaus, the influential 20th-century design movement

The design school was short-lived but immensely impactful, turning design in architecture, typography, and a number of other fields away from superfluous ornamentation and toward practical, straightforward expression. This history of the movement from the Metropolitan Museum of Art outlines its major figures, key events, and the ways its influence persists.

A brief history of dance music

Throughout history, crowded, dimly lit, sweat-filled, and loud spaces that have hosted dance music have mirrored and shaped social change. Tracing the evolution of dance and club culture from the 1950s to today reveals changes in youth culture and desires over time. Read this article to learn more about how dance floors have reflected societal movements.

Read biographies of 3 generations of the Adams family

The Massachusetts Historical Society provides biographical profiles covering three generations of the Adams family—using its extensive archive of family papers and correspondence to trace one of the most notable dynasties in American political history.

George Washington married Martha Dandridge Custis in 1759

Before marrying George Washington, Martha Dandridge Curtis was a wealthy widow with two children. Their marriage formed a stable personal and economic partnership. She managed Mount Vernon during Washington's absences and later played a central role as a political host and confidant throughout his public life.

Explore a Macy's historical timeline

From its founding as RH Macy & Co. in 1858, to its 150th birthday in 2008, Macy’s has a long and storied history. Luckily, the store has chronicled many of its major milestones on its website, including key Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade milestones.

With no textbooks or antibiotics, this WWI surgeon pioneered facial reconstruction

New Zealand surgeon Dr. Harold Gillies made extraordinary advances in the field of reconstructive surgery during World War I and after. This 36-minute NPR podcast interviews historian Lindsey Fitzharris, author of Gillie's biography, The Facemaker, charting how the good doctor reconstructed the faces of numerous soldiers in an age before antibiotics and plastic surgery as we know it today.

One of the most famous portraits ever taken is 'Afghan Girl' (1984) by Steve McCurry, yet the subject Sharbat Gula went much of her life without being identified or benefitting from the image's success.

Warren Buffett's former professor Benjamin Graham is known as the 'father of value investing,' a strategy in which investors seek to buy stocks trading below their intrinsic worth.

Mid-century modern graphic designers, known for their bright colors and bold lines in advertising, also found success with children's books.

The Mona Lisa's celebrity status and repeated restorations have obscured what made the painting so revolutionary for its time

Watch a 1934 short film starring jazz legend Cab Calloway, a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance's music scene

A researcher recently discovered an interview from 1967 between groundbreaking journalist Joan Didion and the Grateful Dead, years before the band became an institution.

English mathematician Ada Lovelace wrote the first computer algorithm a century before computers existed and hypothesized that computing devices would one day be able to compose music—foreseeing the generative AI systems of today.

'Saturday Night Fever,' the 1977 film that introduced disco to the mainstream, was based on a fabricated magazine story.

A century of Billboard issues documenting the evolution of popular music.

The Brothers Grimm were lawyers before they were storytellers, and became interested in fairy tales as they began investigating how rules and customs had been passed down through cultures.

Explore the known asteroids, comets, and spacecraft involved in asteroid studies within our solar system with 'Eyes on Asteroids,' a 3D visualization from NASA.

Many legends about George Washington, including his supposed wooden teeth and the story of cutting down the cherry tree, lack evidence.

A Yale student wrote a profound essay about the consulting industry's influence on elite college students that was published in a book of her writing after she died in a post-graduation car accident.

Graffiti dates back to at least ancient Pompeii, where citizens scrawled messages to one another on public walls

The story of Dollree Mapp, whose legal challenge over her 1957 conviction for possessing "obscene material" led to a major strengthening of the Fourth Amendment

The first horror movie is believed to be George Méliès' 1986 short 'The Haunted Castle,' which pioneered the use of special effects

American short story writer Flannery O'Connor raised 40 peacocks, which became potent symbols for her fiction's elegant violence

See how each of the more than two million known species relates to each other—and to common ancestors—in this zoomable tree of life.

How Amazon operates a 'flywheel' business model, a self-reinforcing cycle that drives continuous growth

SpongeBob exemplifies Aristotle's philosophy for living well because he understands that happiness doesn't come from external factors like money, recognition, or power.

Against his wishes, Albert Einstein's brain was removed before his cremation, and the pathologist responsible stored it for decades in mason jars within a beer cooler.

Gerrymandering works through two techniques: cracking opposing voters across districts to dilute their power, and packing them into a few to waste their votes in lopsided majorities.

Search a massive database of over 4 decades of clues from the TV quiz show 'Jeopardy!'

About 12.5% of US adults experience a phobia in their lifetime, a diagnosis that hinges on the intense fear interfering with daily life and persisting for at least six months.