MUSEUM OF PERFORMANCE & DESIGN

Founded in 1947 and incorporated as a 501(c)(3) public charity in 1976, the Museum of Performance & Design (MP+D) is a San Francisco institution dedicated to collecting, preserving, and providing access to materials that document the region’s performing arts history. The museum maintains a large research archive and reference collection—more than 3.5 million items including costumes, design drawings, playbills, photographs, audio-visual recordings, and personal papers—and serves artists, scholars, and the public. MP+D operates onsite and online exhibitions, research appointments, and public programs, and has been active in recent years in digitization and collaborative exhibitions. In the last 2–3 years the museum mounted onsite and online exhibitions (including work focused on Bay Area dance legacies and themed exhibitions such as The Music of Bert Williams), partnered with local cultural organizations for traveling displays, and completed significant audiovisual digitization projects to improve public access to historic recordings.