Playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, Dancer Masazumi Chaya & More to Receive Honorary Doctoral Degrees From Juilliard

The Juilliard School will hold its 117th commencement ceremony on May 20, 2022, at 10:30am. The ceremony will be held outdoors on the Lincoln Center campus in Damrosch Park, presided over by Juilliard President Damian Woetzel. It will also be livestreamed at juilliard.edu for those unable to attend in person.

As part of the commencement ceremony, Juilliard will give the following leaders honorary degrees in recognition of their outstanding contributions to the field of arts and culture: dancer, teacher, and stager Masazumi Chaya; operatic bass-baritone and Juilliard alumnus Dr. Simon Estes; playwright Suzan-Lori Parks; ethnomusicologist Dr. Ahmad Sarmast-founder and director of the Afghanistan National Institute of Music; and conductor and composer Michael Tilson Thomas, who will deliver the commencement address.

"The class of 2022 has been challenged by circumstances unimaginable when they first applied to Juilliard, and yet they have succeeded with unique distinction as they have risen above those challenges," said Juilliard President Damian Woetzel. "We can look to them to be exceptionally innovative in the years to come. And as we also celebrate our five distinguished honorary doctorate recipients, our graduating students can draw inspiration from these powerful examples of artistic brilliance and societal impact."

Tilson Thomas will also conduct a brass ensemble during the commencement ceremony, performing Dahl's Music for Brass Instruments.

Juilliard's new branch campus in Tianjin, China will host its first-ever commencement exercises on May 20 at 10am local time (10pm New York time on May 19) for its inaugural class of 34 Masters of Music students. The commencement address will be given by Joseph W. Polisi, chief China officer and president emeritus of the Juilliard School. The ceremony will be livestreamed on the branch school's Chinese social media platforms, and available for on-demand viewing on juilliard.edu at a later date.

Juilliard's Preparatory Division will hold its first joint commencement to include both Pre-College and the Music Advancement Program (MAP) on Saturday, May 21, at noon in Juilliard's Peter Jay Sharp Theater. Weston Sprott, dean and director of the Preparatory Division, and Anthony McGill, MAP artistic director, will present certificates of completion to the graduates. Wynton Marsalis ('81, trumpet), the director of Juilliard Jazz, will give the Preparatory Division commencement address.

Commencement speaker and honorary doctorate recipient Michael Tilson Thomas is co-founder and artistic director of the New World Symphony, music director laureate of the San Francisco Symphony, and conductor laureate of the London Symphony Orchestra. In addition to conducting the world's leading orchestras and winning 12 Grammy Awards for his recordings, Tilson Thomas is noted for his work as a composer and for producing projects dedicated to music education and the expansion of the concert experience. Tilson Thomas is an Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France, member of the American Academies of Arts & Sciences and Arts & Letters, National Medal of Arts recipient, Peabody Award winner, and 2019 Kennedy Center Honoree.

Dancer, teacher, and stager Masazumi Chaya joined Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in 1972 and performed with the company for 15 years. In 1988, he became the company's rehearsal director, and then served from 1991 to 2019 as associate artistic director. A master teacher, both on tour with the company and in his native Japan, he served as choreographic assistant to Alvin Ailey and John Butler and continues to provide invaluable creative assistance in all facets of the Masazumi Chaya Fund and Alvin Ailey Choreographic Legacy Project operations.

Bass-baritone Dr. Simon Estes ('64, voice; former faculty) made his operatic debut with the Deutsche Opera in Aida in 1965. Since winning the bronze medal in Moscow's Tchaikovsky competition in 1966, the opera star has performed with 84 of the major opera companies around the world in more than 100 roles, and enjoyed success as a recitalist, in concert with more than 115 orchestras, and as an educator. In 1978, as the Flying Dutchman, Estes became the first black male singer to perform at the Bayreuth Festival.

Named among Time magazine's "100 Innovators for the Next Wave," Suzan-Lori Parks is one of the most acclaimed voices in American drama today. She is the first African-American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize in Drama, is a MacArthur "genius" Award recipient, and was awarded the Gish Prize for Excellence in the Arts.

Founder and director of the Afghanistan National Institute of Music (ANIM), Dr. Ahmad Naser Sarmast, is a music educator, trumpet player, and the son of a renowned Afghan musician. He fled his home country in the 1990s, when Afghanistan's rich musical heritage was abruptly halted by the civil war. Following the nation's liberation from Taliban rule, Sarmast returned to Kabul to establish ANIM in 2010. ANIM offers music education both within traditional Afghan music and Western classic music to boys and girls regardless of gender, ethnicity, and social backgrounds, and has become one of the most influential educational and cultural entities, as well as a symbol of freedom, in Afghanistan.

Biographies of the Honorary Degree Recipients

Masazumi Chaya was born in Fukuoka, Japan, where he began his classical ballet training. Upon moving to New York in December 1970, he studied modern dance and performed with the Richard Englund Repertory Company. Chaya joined Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in 1972 and performed with the company for 15 years. In 1988, he became the company's rehearsal director after serving as assistant rehearsal director for two years. A master teacher, both on tour with the company and in his native Japan, he served as choreographic assistant to Alvin Ailey and John Butler. From 1991 to 2019, Chaya served as associate artistic director of the company. A recipient of the Dance Magazine Award, he continues to provide creative assistance in all facets of the Masazumi Chaya Fund and Alvin Ailey Choreographic Legacy Project operations.

In 2002, Chaya coordinated the company's appearance at the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree-lighting ceremony, broadcast on NBC. Chaya has restaged numerous ballets, including Alvin Ailey's Flowers for the State Ballet of Missouri (1990) and The River for the Royal Swedish Ballet (1993), Ballet Florida (1995), National Ballet of Prague (1995), Pennsylvania Ballet (1996), and Colorado Ballet (1998). He has also restaged The Mooche, The Stack-Up, Episodes, Bad Blood, Hidden Rites, and Witness for the company. At the beginning of his tenure as associate artistic director, Chaya restaged Ailey's For 'Bird'-With Love for a Dance in America program called Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater: Steps Ahead. In 2000, he restaged Ailey's Night Creature for the Rome Opera House and The River for La Scala Ballet. In 2003, he restaged The River for North Carolina Dance Theatre and for Julio Bocca's Ballet Argentino. More recently, Chaya restaged Blues Suite, Forgotten Time, Streams, Urban Folk Dance, and Vespers for the company. As a performer, Chaya has appeared on Japanese television in both dramatic and musical productions.

Bass-baritone Dr. Simon Estes ('64, voice; former faculty) made his operatic debut with the Deutsche Opera in Aida in 1965. Since winning the bronze medal in Moscow's Tchaikovsky competition in 1966, he has performed with 84 of the major opera companies around the world in more than 100 roles, and enjoyed success as a recitalist, in concert with more than 115 orchestras, and as an educator. In 1973, he performed for the opening of the Kennedy Center Concert Hall, and in 1978, as the Flying Dutchman, Estes became the first black male singer to perform at the Bayreuth Festival. Estes has sung for seven United States presidents as well as other world leaders and the Nobel Prize committee, and is the only person to have performed for the 25th, 50th, and 75th anniversaries of the United Nations. Other notable figures for whom Estes has performed are Nelson Mandela, Rabin, Arafat, Francios Mitterand, Boris Yeltsin, and Desmond Tutu.

His humanitarian efforts with Nothing but Nets have helped provide mosquito nets for families across Africa and other countries where mosquitos spread malaria, and his foundations in Switzerland, Oklahoma, and Iowa have awarded more than 600 scholarships for students to attend colleges and universities in varied disciplines of study. In addition to having served on the Juilliard faculty, Estes has taught at Boston and Iowa State universities and Wartburg College and given lectures and master classes at Harvard, Duke, the University of Iowa, and around the world. He also founded the Simon Estes Music High School in Cape Town, South Africa.

Estes has performed at opera houses all over the world, including the Metropolitan Opera, Chicago Lyric Opera, Boston Opera, San Francisco Opera, National Opera in Washington D.C., Seattle Opera, and Liceo Opera in Barcelona, Spain. In Germany, he has performed in West Berlin Oper, Hamburg, Munich, Frankfurt, and Stuttgart. In France he has performed at the Opéra National de Paris and the Opéra Bastille. The 102 roles that Estes has performed include the following title roles: the Flying Dutchman, Boris Godunov, Attila, Nabucco, Macbeth, Figaro, Porgy, and Moses. He will be formally inducted into Opera America's Opera Hall of Fame this fall.

Estes has received 12 honorary degrees; this marks his 13th. He was born in Centerville, Iowa, in 1938, one generation away from being born into slavery. His book, In His Own Voice, was published in 1999.

Suzan-Lori Parks is one of the most acclaimed voices in American drama. She is the first African-American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize in drama, is a MacArthur "genius" Award recipient, and was awarded the Gish Prize for Excellence in the Arts. Other grants and awards include those from the National Endowment for the Arts, Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, and New York Foundation for the Arts. She is also a recipient of a Lila-Wallace Reader's Digest Award, a CalArts/Alpert Award in the Arts, the Steinberg Award, and a Guggenheim Foundation Grant. She is an alum of New Dramatists and of Mount Holyoke College.

Parks' project 365 Days/365 Plays, in which she wrote a play daily for a year, was produced in more than 700 theaters worldwide. Her other plays include: Topdog/Underdog (2002 Pulitzer Prize); The Book of Grace; Unchain My Heart: The Ray Charles Musical; In the Blood (2000 Pulitzer Prize finalist); Venus (1996 Obie); The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World ...; Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom (1990 Obie, best New American play); The America Play; and f-ing A.

Her adaptation of The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess won the 2012 Tony for best revival of a musical and Father Comes Home From the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3) was a 2015 Pulitzer finalist. In response to the Trump presidency, Parks wrote A Hundred Plays for the First Hundred Days. White Noise, which won the Outer Critics Circle Award, recently enjoyed its European premiere at London's Bridge Theatre. Her work for television and film includes adaptations of Native Son (HBO, NAACP Image Award), and Their Eyes Were Watching God (Oprah Winfrey Presents). Original screenplays include Girl 6 (directed by Spike Lee), and The United States vs. Billie Holliday (directed by Lee Daniels). For season three-Aretha Franklin-of the television series Genius, Parks served as showrunner, head writer, and executive producer. During the pandemic, Parks embarked on another play-a-day writing project resulting in Plays for the Plague Year, which is being workshopped at The Public Theater. In addition to writing songs and performing with her band, Parks is writer in residence at the Public, where she regularly offers her free online creativity class, Watch Me Work.

Dr. Ahmad Naser Sarmast is the founder and director of the Afghanistan National Institute of Music. A music educator, trumpet player, and the son of a renowned Afghan musician, he fled his home country in the 1990s, when music was forbidden under Taliban rule. Following the nation's liberation, he return to Kabul to establish the Afghanistan National Institute of Music (ANIM) in 2010, of which he is the director. ANIM flourished; its students and ensembles, including the all-girls' orchestra Zohra, toured the world as a beacon of hope and a positive face for Afghanistan's future, though Sarmast was the target of three assassination attempts and was injured in a suicide bombing during an ANIM performance in Kabul in 2014. When the Taliban retook power in 2021, musical rights and girls' education were again in jeopardy in Afghanistan. Sarmast worked with an international coalition of friends, artists, diplomats, business leaders, philanthropists, and others to rescue the 273 members of the school and re-establish it in Lisbon. ANIM's airlift to freedom remains the single largest evacuation of a self-contained group following the withdrawal of US and NATO troops in 2021.

Sarmast and ANIM are winners of the 2018 Polar Prize and he was also named an honorary member of the Royal Philharmonic Society, London. In tribute to his service to children and Afghan music, the president of Afghanistan awarded him with prestigious state medal of Sayed Jamaluddin and the honorary Civil Service Excellence and Innovation Award. Sarmast received his PhD in music from Monash University in 2005, the first Afghan ethnomusicologist to receive a doctorate. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in performance and music education and a Master of Arts in musicology/ethnomusicology from the Moscow State Conservatory. A dual national of Australia and Afghanistan, he makes his home in Lisbon with the ANIM community and in Melbourne with his wife, children, and a granddaughter.

Michael Tilson Thomas is co-founder and artistic director of the New World Symphony, music director laureate of the San Francisco Symphony and conductor laureate of the London Symphony Orchestra. He is a 12-time Grammy Award winner and has conducted the major orchestras of Europe and the U.S. Born in Los Angeles, he studied conducting and composition with Ingolf Dahl at the University of Southern California and, as a young musician, worked with artists including Igor Stravinsky and Aaron Copland. In his mid 20s, he became assistant conductor-and later principal guest conductor-of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He subsequently served as music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic, principal guest conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra. In 1987, he co-founded the New World Symphony (NWS), a postgraduate orchestral academy in Miami Beach dedicated to preparing young musicians of diverse backgrounds for leadership roles in classical music. He has worked with more than 1,200 NWS Fellows. In June, he becomes artistic director laureate.

Tilson Thomas became music director of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) in 1995, ushering in a period of significant growth and heightened international recognition for the orchestra. He led SFS in championing contemporary and American composers alongside classical masters, and as music director laureate, he returns to conduct the orchestra each season. His discography includes more than 120 recordings and his television work includes series for the BBC and PBS, the New York Philharmonic's Young People's Concerts and numerous televised performances. His profile Michael Tilson Thomas: Where Now Is aired on PBS' American Masters series in 2020. Throughout his career, Tilson Thomas has been an active composer, with major works including From the Diary of Anne Frank, premiered with narrator Audrey Hepburn, and Meditations on Rilke. Both appear on SFS Media's recent Grammy-winning recording of his music. He is an Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France, member of the American Academies of Arts & Sciences and Arts & Letters, National Medal of Arts recipient, and 2019 Kennedy Center honoree.

About The Juilliard School

Founded in 1905, The Juilliard School is a world leader in performing arts education. The school's mission is to provide the highest caliber of artistic education for gifted musicians, dancers, and actors, composers, choreographers, and playwrights from around the world so that they may achieve their fullest potential as artists, leaders, and global citizens. Under the leadership of President Damian Woetzel since 2018, Juilliard is guided in all its work by the core values of excellence; creativity; and equity, diversity, inclusion and belonging (EDIB). Juilliard is committed to enrolling the most talented students regardless of their financial background.

Located at Lincoln Center in New York City, Juilliard offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in dance, drama (acting and playwriting), and music (classical, jazz, historical performance, and vocal arts). Currently more than 800 artists from 43 states and 44 countries and regions are enrolled in Juilliard's College Division, where they appear in more than 700 annual performances in the school's five theaters; at Lincoln Center's Alice Tully and David Geffen halls and at Carnegie Hall; as well as at other venues around New York City, the country, and the world. The continuum of learning at Juilliard also includes nearly 400 students from elementary through high school enrolled in the Preparatory Division, including its Music Advancement Program (MAP), which serves students from diverse backgrounds often underrepresented in the classical music field. More than 800 students are enrolled in Juilliard Extension, the flagship continuing education program taught both in person and remotely by a dedicated faculty of performers, creators, and scholars. Beyond its New York campus, Juilliard is defining new directions in performing arts education for a range of learners and enthusiasts through a global K-12 educational curricula and graduate studies at The Tianjin Juilliard School in China.

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