Amy Beach (1867-1944) preferred to publish her music as Mrs. H.H.A. Beach. Born Amy Marcy Cheney, she was the first American woman to receive national acclaim both as a composer and a concert pianist. She made her Boston concert debut at age sixteen, and during the following two years performed with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and began touring widely as a soloist. In 1885, she married, and it was during this time that the prolific composer produced a wide array of compositions including an opera, several orchestral pieces, many piano pieces, sacred and secular music and over 100 songs for voice and piano. After her husband’s death in 1910, Mrs. Beach continued to compose and resumed her concertizing in America and Germany. Her most famous works include a Gaelic Symphony, Festival Jubilate, which was written for the dedication of the Women's Building at Chicago's Columbian Exposition of 1892, and the Piano Concerto in C-Sharp minor.

Isadora Duncan (1878-1927), an American dancer who pioneered Modern Dance (some call her the founder of Modern Dance), became famous for creating dances based on Greek classical art, revolutionizing what was acceptable. She danced barefoot, with her hair loose, wearing a modified Greek tunic with numerous scarves, often to music not intended for dance. She wrote in her autobiography My Life (1928), " I was seeking and finally discovered the central spring of all movement, the crater of motor power, the unity from which all diversions of movement are born, the mirror of vision for the creation of dance."

Katherine Dunham (1909- ) is world famous as a dancer and choreographer, though it is less well known that she also earned a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Chicago, with a thesis on "Dances of Haiti." She did ground breaking work in every aspect of dance, theatre, music, and education. She danced with Les Ballets Negre, the first black ballet company in the United States, and appeared in the Broadway production of Cabin in the Sky (1940), which she co-choreographed with George Balanchine. She then formed the Katherine Dunham Dance Company with which she toured more than 60 countries, amassing cultural and theatrical experiences which she recounted in eight books and numerous articles and short stories. Throughout her career, Ms. Dunham fought for racial equality. Her work as Artist in Residence at Southern Illinois University resulted in the formation of the Performing Arts Training Center for the community's youth. She also founded the Katherine Dunham Museum and Children's School, which are still main attractions in East St. Louis, Illinois. At the Dunham School of Dance in New York City (1945-1955; and mid-1960s), she trained dancers in classical ballet, African and Caribbean dance forms, anthropology, and other cultural arts.

Guerilla Girls are an anonymous group of women in the arts who do creative social actions to raise awareness of the way women artists continue to be marginalized. They wear gorilla masks to keep the focus on issues rather than personalities, and to pun on their guerilla style of social action. To read more about Guerilla Girls—or to become one yourself--see www.guerillagirls.com

Frida Kahlo (1907-54 ) began painting during convalescence from a bus accident when she was 18. Her crippling injuries led to numerous operations and considerable suffering. In April of 1953, less than a year before her death at the age of 47, Frida Kahlo had her first major exhibition of paintings in her native Mexico. By that time her health had so deteriorated that no one expected her to attend. But at 8 p.m. an ambulance drew up. Dressed in her favorite Mexican costume, she was carried to a four poster bed installed in the gallery. The bed was bedecked with photos of her husband, muralist Diego Rivera, and her political heroes, Malenkov and Stalin. Papier maché skeletons dangled from the canopy, and a mirror affixed to the underside reflected her joyful though ravaged face. One by one, friends and admirers greeted Frida, formed a circle around her bed, and sang Mexican ballads until well past midnight. This occasion testifies to the qualities that marked her as a person and painter, her gallantry in the face of physical suffering, her insistence on surprise and specificity, her love of spectacle as a mask to preserve privacy and personal dignity. Most of her some 200 paintings were self portraits. "I paint self portraits," she said, " because I am so often alone and because I am the person I know best."

Metamorphoses –mythological stories from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1^st century B.C.E.) inspired modern English composer Benjamin Britten’s Six Metamorphoses after Ovid (1951), each movement of which is named for a mythological character. In the story of Pan and Syrinx (1^st movement), the god Pan chases a nymph Syrinx, who escapes only when her sister nymphs transform her into reeds. Pan makes the reeds into a reed pipe. Niobe (3^rd movement) was happily married to a son of Zeus who was a wonderful musician and became ruler of Thebes. They had 7 sons and 7 daughters. After all her good fortune, Queen Niobe became arrogant and called on the people of Thebes to worship her as a god. The gods punished her arrogance by striking all of her children dead. Niobe collapsed in grief, and was transformed into a stone that remained perpetually wet with her tears. Arethusa (6^th movement) was a huntress dedicated to chastity, hunting, and the goddess Artemis. While swimming in a river, the god of the river, Alpheus, began to pursue her in the form of a man. She fled and, calling on Artemis to save her, was transformed into a spring of water, which allowed her to escape from Greece to Sicily.

Marilyn Monroe (1926-61), born Norma Jean Mortenson, became a movie legend and sex symbol of the 1950s and 60s. Although she made only eleven films over the course of her career, in her heydey barely a day passed when one of the New York newspapers wasn't featuring a Monroe photo, article, gossip column item, or all three. She formed her own production company and acted as producer and star in The Prince and the Showgirl with Sir Lawrence Olivier in 1957. This was a radical move for a woman in the 1950s. In 1961, she divorced her 3^rd husband, playwright Arthur Miller, and died two months after her 36th birthday, of an apparent drug overdose. To this day, the cause of her death is as mysterious as the woman herself.

Mother Teresa (1910-97), Albanian-Indian nun, in 1948 founded the Order of the Missionaries of Charity, which served the blind, the aged, lepers, the disabled, and the dying. When she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, there were 1800 Missionaries of Charity. She believed that, "Peace begins with a smile" and "Good works are links that form a chain of love."

Billy Tipton (1914-1989), a now notorious jazz musician, grew up as Dorothy Tipton in Oklahoma City and Kansas City but lived as a man from the time she was nineteen until she died at age 74. Playing a sequence of roles historically reserved for the "opposite" sex, Billy demonstrated by her accomplishment that gender, unlike sex, is in large part a performance: ‘she’ was the actor; 'he' was the role. And if s/he's first act of cross dressing was a brilliant problem-solving prank, Billy quickly found that being taken for a man provided access to almost everything s/he wanted --- music, travel, and the love of adventurous and caretaking women. As Sycamore says of her, "Artists entangled in everyone's life offer a point of viewing beauty every day." Billy Tipton’s biography was published in 1999 by Diane Wood Middlebrook, Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton.

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was a major contributor to the making of Modern literature. Famous for her novels, especially Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), she has also become famous for the detailed record of her life published in multivolume diaries and letters. Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929) is a landmark in feminist criticism, perhaps the single most powerful articulation of the cultural and social forces that have made it difficult for women to succeed as writers. Woolf’s words, rediscovered long after she wrote them, have led generations of women to see the world and women’s abilities in new and empowering ways.