Mills Performing Arts is committed to promoting action and exchange in the performing arts, and supporting artists and scholars who reflect, explore, and celebrate the abundant cultural, racial, gender, and economic diversity of our society.

We bring together the work of the Mills College Dance, Music, Theater, and Literatures & Languages Departments with the goals of fostering deeper ties with our Bay Area community and championing a dynamic, boundary-breaking performing arts scene.

To further these goals, we host the Mills Performing Artist-in-Residence Program, create opportunities for artists to collaborate with Mills students and faculty, and provide access to Mills Performing Arts resources and venues—including Littlefield Concert Hall, Holland Theater, Rothwell Theater, the Greek Theatre, and the Digital Performance Theater.

For more than 120 years, these five theaters have hosted performances by groundbreaking artists such as Pauline Oliveros, Dave Brubeck, Morton Subotnick, Anna Halprin, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown ’58, Muhal Richard Abrams, Molissa Fenley ’75, Fred Frith, and Rebeca Mauleón ’89.

Mills Performing Arts makes these venues available to today’s vanguard of performing artists and offers spaces where all voices and communities can be seen, heard, and welcomed. The creation of safe, supportive places for the rigorous, creative practice of innovation and craft in performance work is at the heart of our mission. We believe that every performance is an opportunity, and with every telling of a story, sharing of a song, or participation in a dance, we gain insight into our shared humanity, our imaginations, and the interconnectedness of the world.

Situated on the Mills College campus in Oakland, California, we acknowledge that Mills Performing Arts and our venues operate on the traditional lands of the Ohlone People.

Our Values

Cultural Equity

Showcasing a dynamic, diverse roster of performance-based artists and teachers

Creating affordable access to resources for both makers and audience

Providing a safe, professional, and inspiring creative environment for all artists, staff, and guests

Inclusive Excellence

Opening the door to a variety of personal experiences, values, and worldviews

Encouraging rigorous inquiry and dialogue

Engaging in community partnerships that create opportunity and support creative practice and the production of performance work

Gender and Racial Justice

Committed to challenging social, cultural, and economic inequalities imposed and arising from any differential distribution of power, resources, and privilege at Mills College and in the larger society

Our People

Alexander Zendzian, Executive Director Alexander Zendzian is a dancer, musician, theater producer, and arts administrator originally from the Penobscot Valley in Central Maine. They arrived at Mills College in 2018 following eleven years with the Joe Goode Performance Group, as both a performing member of the company and as program/operations manager. During that time, they were instrumental in launching and operating the Joe Goode Annex, a multi-purpose performance venue in San Francisco, California, and developing community-centered programming. Zendzian’s career as a performing artist is rooted in work with dance pioneer Anna Halprin, Sara Shelton Mann, and Joe Goode, as well as multiple organizations including Capacitor, Motion-Lab, Gamelan X, touring nationally with Brass Menažeri Balkan Brass Band and internationally as a member of Project Bandaloop. Their work in theater production includes lighting design for Bay Area dance theater artists including Fog Beast, Heather Baer, and James Graham; and extensive production stage management, including for Sara Shelton Mann’s 40-year retrospective Erasing Time in December 2015 at the Forum at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco and Bandaloop’s local and touring projects. Zendzian is committed to cultivating opportunities for artists to engage in their creative practice and to craft and share performances as a mechanism of our society’s necessary seeking of shared understanding and repair. A long-time resident of Oakland, California, Zendzian is inspired to be working to create a new point of access to the performing arts, housed in such historic venues in East Oakland, that serves the local community as well as the greater Bay Area and beyond. Brendan Glasson, Audio Director—Center for Contemporary Music & Mills Performing Arts Brendan Glasson is a composer, performer, and multimedia artist originally from Providence, Rhode Island. He has shown work internationally, including at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, the MUDAM Museum in Luxembourg, the Contemporary Jewish Museum, and the RISD Museum. Glasson moved to Oakland to pursue an MFA in electronic music and recording media at Mills College, where he composed works around ideas of stillness, slowness, and imperceptible change. In his work as audio director, Glasson is interested in connecting the line from the rich history of innovation and experimentation in the arts at Mills to the new resources, people, and ideas that define the College today. Stephanie Hewett, Administrative Assistant Stephanie Hewett is a choreographer, movement researcher, performer, and teacher from the Bronx, New York (Lenape territory). She is a graduate of Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and the Performing Arts and has studied at the Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in London. She holds an MFA in dance from Mills College and was recently on faculty at the College of San Mateo. Her movement-based performance work aims to highlight fluid identity and reimagines the future as a site of rebirth. Her current research entails navigating performance through injury, pleasure frequencies, and excavating ancestral vestiges in the body. Steed Cowart, Concert Coordinator Steed Cowart is a composer, conductor, and teacher living in Oakland, California. In his music he often explores subtleties of timbre and tries for clarity and concision of harmony and form. His music has been performed around the United States and Canada by such musicians as Santa Cruz New Music Works, pianist Sarah Cahill, baritone Thomas Buckner, the Joan Jeanrenaud and William Winant Duo, the János Négyesy and Päivikki Nykter Violin Duo, Mills Performing Group, Sonor, and Ensemble Nova and at the CalArts Contemporary Music Festival and Berkeley Arts Festival. Since 1986, he has worked at Mills College where he directs the Contemporary Performance Ensemble, is the concert coordinator for the is a composer, conductor, and teacher living in Oakland, California. In his music he often explores subtleties of timbre and tries for clarity and concision of harmony and form. His music has been performed around the United States and Canada by such musicians as Santa Cruz New Music Works, pianist Sarah Cahill, baritone Thomas Buckner, the Joan Jeanrenaud and William Winant Duo, the János Négyesy and Päivikki Nykter Violin Duo, Mills Performing Group, Sonor, and Ensemble Nova and at the CalArts Contemporary Music Festival and Berkeley Arts Festival. Since 1986, he has worked at Mills College where he directs the Contemporary Performance Ensemble, is the concert coordinator for the Mills Music Now Concert Series , and teaches composition, music theory, and conducting. He holds a PhD from the University of California, San Diego, where he studied with Bernard Rands, Pauline Oliveros, Robert Erickson, Roger Reynolds, and Edwin Harkins. Cowart frequently conducts the Mills Performing Group and the William Winant Percussion Group and has led the Club Foot Orchestra in touring performances accompanying silent films. He conducted four orchestra pieces by Roscoe Mitchell on Mitchell’s CD Discussions, which the New York Times chose as one of the 25 best classical music recordings of 2017. He was chosen to participate in the International Gugak Workshop in Seoul, South Korea in summer 2019. Cowart’s music is published by Material Press in Frankfurt, Germany. G. Chris Griffin, Lighting Designer in Residence G. Chris Griffin is senior production manager at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. A graduate of the Theater and Performance Studies Program at UC Berkeley, he was previously production and lighting director of Alonzo King LINES Ballet, an internationally renowned touring contemporary ballet company. He has designed and implemented lights at over 150 venues in 20 countries and four continents, including the Grimaldi Forum in Monaco, the Palais de Chaillot in Paris, and the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg. Jim Graham, Technical Theater Specialist Jim Graham’s career in theater began as a teenager, when he ran lights for the Music Department’s Mills Performing Group and pulled the curtain for dance concerts in ’s career in theater began as a teenager, when he ran lights for the Music Department’s Mills Performing Group and pulled the curtain for dance concerts in Lisser Hall . After university, he joined the College staff in 1972 as technical director of Haas Pavilion, the newly constructed performance space for dance at Mills. In 1982, he became the founding director of the office of technical services, combining production services for dance, the Language Lab, and the Audio-Visual Services office. In his time as director, Graham oversaw the introduction of widespread video-recorded instructional assistance and use of computers in the classroom, retrofitting dozens of existing classrooms for new technology and participating in the design of the Betty Irene Moore Natural Sciences Building, the Education Complex, and the Lorry I. Lokey School of Business and Public Policy building. Along the way, he became technical director of Lisser Hall, when the Dance Department moved its production program out of Haas Pavilion in 2003. In a 2014 departmental reorganization, he relinquished his audiovisual position, thus being the first, last, and only director of technical services for Mills College. He retained his position in Lisser Hall and participated in the design for its renovation, which was completed in 2018. Graham’s most recent major project for the College was the design of Rothwell Theater , built in 2017.

Production Coordinators

Sally Decker Sally Decker is a composer and performer based in Oakland, California. She graduated from Mills with her MFA in electronic music and recording media in 2019. Her approach to the creative process and form is psychological and sensory, rooted in the goal of strengthening a reflective focus toward our internal intuitive worlds. Recent interests include electronic feedback systems, the voice, and utilization of language in performance. Brendan Page Brendan Page graduated from San Francisco State University’s Broadcasting and Electronic Communications Arts Program in 2015 and has worked since as an audio engineer in performance venues across the Bay Area including Starline Social Club, East Bay Center for the Performing Arts, and The Jewish Community Center of Berkeley. His experience ranges from large-scale concerts to children’s recorder recitals. Page leads pay-what-you-can audio engineering classes at Mutual Stores, an art space near Mills College. Minerva Ramirez Minerva Ramirez graduated from UC Berkeley with a BA in English and minor in technical theater. For the last five years, she worked as a freelance electrician for theater and dance around the Bay Area, including Cal Performances, Berkeley Rep, Center Rep, Marin Theater Company, SF Playhouse, Smuin Ballet, Diablo Ballet, Margaret Jenkins Dance Company, and Merola Opera Program. She is currently the assistant production manager at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.

Contact Us

Mills Performing Arts

5000 MacArthur Blvd.

Oakland, CA 94613

P: 510.430.2191

E: performing-arts@mills.edu