PAJ's 20th Anniversary: 1976-1996

Dear Readers:

This year with great pleasure we celebrate PAJ’s 20th year of publishing activity. Since we founded the press and began publishing Performing Arts Journal in 1976, we have seen PAJ grow from a shoestring operation started by two graduate students in a New York City apartment to a highly respected publishing program of international renown. Now, in collaboration with the Johns Hopkins University Press, PAJ continues to be the leading publisher of texts by many of the 20th century’s most inþuential writers and artists in the world of performance.

Under our continuous editorship these twenty years, PAJ has published 100 individual titles, featuring over 750 plays and performance texts in 18 languages, and valuable editions of critical essays. PAJ has become known for its support of modernist and avant-garde writing, and for its commitment to works in translation. Its historical and critical studies have signiþcantly shaped contemporary thinking on the arts, and focused attention on often neglected writers and those beyond the mainstream.

Authors we have published have been acclaimed with numerous major distinctions, including the Nobel Prize, Pulitzer Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, George Jean Nathan Award, Obie, and the MacArthur Fellowship. Several PAJ books have been singled out for their achievement by professsional publishing and scholarly associations, and have won design awards, too. Our periodical, Performing Arts Journal, now in a new format and design, recently brought out its special 50th issue on the theme ³The Arts and the University.² PAJ has been honored with an Obie for ³Outstanding Achievement in the Off-Broadway and Off-Off- Broadway Theatre,² and the Stanislaw I. Witkiewicz Award for support of Polish theatre culture.

Our plans for the future are þxed on the expansion of the PAJ list to include titles in the visual arts, such as video, installations, and multimedia performance. There is a need for these books to open up the university curriculum and to advance scholarship and research. We envision the development of a performance history that brings together theatre and the visual arts in a far-ranging, truly interdisciplinary understanding of artists and art forms that points the way to the art of the 21st century.

Together with our colleagues at Johns Hopkins, we wish to thank our many readers for their support of PAJ over the years, particularly in this transformative era when people everywhere are rethinking the value and meaning of art, culture, and spectatorship. We hope you will join us in strengthening our commitment to the visionary ideas and artists of our time.