(born 1941) Trained in painting and architecture, Robert Wilson has become a pre-eminent theater artist whose visionary stagings of standard and original work has transformed both scenography and directorial technique. He is best known for the groundbreaking Einstein on the Beach, a collaboration with composer Philip Glass and choreographer Lucinda Childs, first performed in 1976. This nonlinear, abstract 4–5 hour musing on the scientist was stark, abstract and pictorial: Wilson used graphical, architectural and multiple performing arts. Resoundingly multimedia, Wilson has staged operas in Europe and has collaborated with artists such as Susan Sontag, Allen Ginsburg and Red Grooms. He has worked again with Glass on Monsters of Grace (1998), based on the works of the fourteenth century Sufi poet Rumi.