Simone Forti, the Italian American dancer and choreographer whose work reshaped the foundations of postmodern dance, has died at the age of 91 in Los Angeles. Her death was announced by Raffaella Cortese, the Milan-based gallery that represented her, Artforum reported. ARTnews also confirmed the news on 30 July 2026.

The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles publicly mourned Forti's passing on its official Facebook page, describing her as one of the most profoundly influential figures in her field. Forti had been the subject of a wide-ranging exhibition at MOCA, according to the New York Times. She was also a recipient of the Golden Lion, the top honour awarded by the Venice Biennale — the prestigious international art exhibition held biennially in Venice, Italy.

Born in Florence, Italy, in 1935, Forti moved to the United States, where she became a central, if sometimes categorised, figure in the downtown New York dance scene of the 1960s. ARTnews described her as a leading figure associated with the Judson Dance Theater — the influential collective of choreographers and dancers who gathered at the Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village. The New York Times, however, noted that Forti was not formally a member of the Judson Dance Theater, a distinction that underscores the difficulty of pinning down an artist whose work always sat at the edges of categories.

Forti's most enduring contribution was her insistence that everyday movement — walking, leaning, sleeping — was worthy material for performance. Her 1961 "Dance Constructions," a series of works using simple structures such as inclined boards and ropes, treated the body's interaction with objects and gravity as the choreography itself. She also developed a practice she called "News Animation," in which she translated the content of news reports into movement, as documented by the New York Times in 2012.

Forti never stopped working. In January 2010, she performed to a sold-out crowd at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York. As recently as February 2023, then 87, she was experimenting with holograms, the New York Times reported — a remarkable pivot for an artist whose earliest works required nothing more than plywood and a body.

She was represented by The Box LA gallery in Los Angeles in addition to Raffaella Cortese in Milan. No obituary had been posted on The Box LA's website at the time of this report, and the New York Times had not yet published an obituary in its searchable online archive.

What makes Forti's career so unusual is its sheer persistence across mediums and decades. An artist who began with the barest of materials — wood, rope, and the weight of a human body — was, in her late eighties, working with light itself. That arc, from the Judson era's stripped-down experiments to holograms, is not a story of an artist keeping up with technology. It is a story of an artist who spent sixty years asking the same question from every angle she could find: what counts as movement, and who gets to decide.