vailsymposium

Robert Marx is president of The Fan Fox & Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, one of New York City’s leading arts philanthropies. Since 1995, Mr. Marx has appeared on the Metropolitan Opera’s live Saturday afternoon radio broadcasts as an intermission host, commentator and Opera Quiz panelist. His Met programs have ranged from lectures on Berg’s “Wozzeck” and Weill’s “The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny,” to extended features on production issues in opera. His many broadcast interview subjects have included Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, stage director Robert Wilson, Met general manager Joseph Volpe and conductor Valery Gergiev. Marx has also been affiliated with the Minnesota Opera’s New Works Initiative. A former Consulting Editor of Opera News, his speaking engagements include appearances at Lincoln Center, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Salzburg Festival, the Avignon Festival and board retreats for the Juilliard School and Los Angeles Opera. In 2018, he was a principal moderator at the first international World Opera Forum, held at the Teatro Real in Madrid.

From 1989-99 he was Executive Director of Lincoln Center’s New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. During his administration, attendance for the Library’s collections, exhibitions and performance programs grew to exceed 400,000 visitors per year, with the collections expanding to over 8,000,000 items. Among many new initiatives, he created the Library’s first touring program, sending exhibitions about choreographers Alvin Ailey and George Balanchine, director Harold Prince and stage designer Ming Cho Lee across America and to Asia. Major collection acquisitions included the personal archives of choreographer Jerome Robbins, impresario Lincoln Kirstein, composer John Cage, stage designer Boris Aronson and producer Joseph Papp.
From 1987-1989 Mr. Marx was Director of the National Endowment for the Arts Theatre Program and was Director of the New York State Council on the Arts Theatre Program from 1976-1983. A member of the producing team that developed the Los Angeles Olympic Arts Festival (part of the 1984 Olympic Games in that city), he was also Artistic Associate of the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, Co-Producer with Off-Broadway’s Music-Theatre Group and served on the artistic advisory committee of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. With Theatre For A New Audience in New York City, he was Associate Producer on a number of Off-Broadway productions, including Shakespeare’s “Troilus & Cressida” (directed by Sir Peter Hall) and the American premiere of “Waste” by Harley Granville-Barker (OBIE Award 2000, Best Play, directed by Bartlett Sher).