Linda Frye Burnham

Linda Frye Burnham (b. 1940) is a writer, editor, and arts organizer whose work made her the great chronicler of the LA performance art movement. In 1978 — inspired, as she tells it, by discovering feminism, Womanhouse, and the fearless artists coming out of UC Irvine — she founded High Performance, the first magazine in the world devoted exclusively to performance art. As founding editor (and later co-editor with Steven Durland until the magazine's end in 1997), Burnham gave the emerging movement its critical context, its documentation, and its community, reaching 25,000 readers worldwide; the magazine's legacy is now the subject of a multi-year Getty Research Institute and Performance Art Museum initiative. She was also a builder of institutions: she co-founded the 18th Street Arts Complex in Santa Monica (1988, with Susanna Dakin) and Highways Performance Space (1989, with Tim Miller), and later co-founded Art in the Public Interest and the Community Arts Network in North Carolina. A former staff writer for Artforum and contributing editor to The Drama Review, she holds a BA from USC and an MFA in creative writing from UC Irvine, and received a lifetime achievement award from the Women's Caucus for Art in 1999.