Simone Forti, the dancer and choreographer whose spare, instruction-based works reshaped how artists think about movement, has died in Los Angeles at the age of 91.

Her death was confirmed on Wednesday night by her gallery, Raffaella Cortese, in a social media post, according to Artnet News. Forti had lived with Parkinson's disease in her later years.

Born in Florence in 1935 into a Jewish family, Forti emigrated to the United States via Switzerland with her parents and sister to escape rising Italian fascism. The family settled in Los Angeles, where Forti began studying dance, before she moved to New York and into the orbit of the city's most restless experimental artists.

In 1960, Forti initiated what became her best-known body of work, the "Dance Constructions" series. The premise was striking in its simplicity: participants were handed a basic prop — a rope, a board, a box — and a short instruction, then encouraged to improvise. The results were less choreography in the traditional sense than a set of conditions for movement, closer to the logic of a game or a task than to a staged routine. The approach placed Forti at the centre of Fluxus, the international network of artists in the early 1960s who treated instruction, chance and everyday action as material for art.

Major institutions and publications responded to news of her death with the weight her influence carries. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) mourned Forti on its official Facebook page, noting her lifespan as 1935–2026 and describing her as one of the most profoundly influential figures in her field. Artforum magazine's obituary headline called her a "Giant of Postmodern Dance." ArtReview magazine described her as a "pioneer of postmodern dance." The New York Times published an obituary on 29 July 2026, written by Claudia Bauer with photography by Andrea Mohin.

Forti's legacy rests on a radical proposition: that a dancer does not need a fixed routine, only a clear enough instruction and the willingness to follow where it leads. Her "Dance Constructions" have been performed and reinterpreted by generations of artists since their premiere, and the scores — the written instructions themselves — are held and studied as artworks in their own right. She remained active in the Los Angeles arts community throughout her life, even as Parkinson's disease limited her mobility in later years.

She is survived by family in the United States and Italy.