Glorya Kaufman’s Philanthropy

Glorya’s generous gifts have enriched the lives of people of all ages.

With her first gift, Glorya paid tribute to her late husband, a voracious reader. The 10,000-square-foot Donald Bruce Kaufman Brentwood Library serves the residents of over 2,000 homes and is one of the most heavily used libraries in Los Angeles.

Glorya has fulfilled her lifelong love for dance through transformative gifts to a wide range of prestigious institutions throughout the United States, tapping into the tremendous potential of dance to break down socio-cultural barriers and increase communication among people of all ages.

In 2008, Glorya donated funds for the new dance floor in the state-of-the-art dance center for youth at the Mar Vista Family Center.

She has endowed a position for a dance teacher at the Inner City Arts in East Los Angeles. Her donations have enabled over 17,000 children to participate in free dance classes annually at Inner-City Arts, introducing them to dance and movement as a uniquely effective way to convey meaning, emotion, and cultural values.

  • University of California, Los Angeles

    Glorya made one of the largest individual arts donations in UCLA history by funding the restoration of the UCLA Women’s Gym, now known as Glorya Kaufman Hall.

  • Alvin Ailey School of Dance

    Glorya provided four lifetime endowments in support of undergraduate students at the Alvin Ailey School of Dance in New York City and received an honorary degree from Fordham University, which partners with the Ailey School.

  • Juilliard

    Glorya has funded the creation of innovative spaces for performing arts education, including at internationally renowned Juilliard School in New York City, where a large, light-filled dance studio that faces onto Broadway bears her name.

  • The Music Center

    Each season the Los Angeles Music Center comes alive with internationally renowned dance performances and musical interludes through Glorya’s patronage of Glorya Kaufman Presents.

The USC Glorya Kaufman School of Dance

The crown jewel of Glorya’s passion for dance is inlaid into USC, the University of Southern California, where she worked tirelessly with Dean Robert Cutietta, faculty, and staff to create the university’s school for dance in 2012.

The Kaufman School is the first new department at USC in forty-one years and quickly became one of the finest dance schools on the globe. The Kaufman School gave USC and the world a rare opportunity to rethink the professional degree for 21st-century universities. She redefined the role of a dance school within the greater national ecology called “The New Movement,” where artistic preeminence is combined with thoughtful industry access.

The Kaufman School was the first to add business courses to prepare dancers for their real-world financial challenges as artists, which has become a model for other institutions. The Kaufman School curriculum is designed to encourage students to think across boundaries and learn from the diverse cultures both on campus and within the Los Angeles arts community. Students graduate with hard skills and a unique global perspective that is reinforced through collaboration with national and international artists.

Dance is merely one of Glorya’s great passions for expanding cultural arts.

She is a founding member of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), a patron of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and sits on the Board of Directors of the Geffen Playhouse, where she donated funds to build an outside reception area.

She is also a patron of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

Believing in the enduring power of the arts to console, heal, create community, uplift, and transform lives, Glorya made a gift to The Entertainment Community Fund (formerly The Actors Fund) to create an 84-seat theater as part of the Hollywood Arts Collective. The Glorya Kaufman Hollywood Performing Arts Theater will enable the 151 resident artists to create new material and practice old routines.

Glorya also founded the Glorya Kaufman Performing Arts Center at Vista Del Mar in Los Angeles. Once a cottage-style orphanage, Vista Del Mar has grown into an innovative leader in education, mental health, autism, adoption, and early intervention services for children who suffer from abuse, neglect, and despair, with 250 children bused to the facility daily and forty-eight abuse survivors in residence. Vista Del Mar also places children in foster homes.

The Glorya Kaufman Performing Arts Center creates a venue for local and national performers to share the creative process and educate Vista students as well as other diverse audiences from the community through dance, music, and theatrical production.

Glorya is a patron of the Venice Family Clinic in Venice, California, where she donated funds for a new Eye Clinic with follow-up on children’s eye care at the UCLA Jules Stein Eye Institute. Children receive free glasses and, along with their families, receive complete free medical care. The eye examination program has continued to expand over the years. 

Having special concern for eye health, Glorya funded a pre-school mobile unit at UCLA Jules Stein Eye Clinic under the direction of Dr. Leonard Apt that has operated for over twenty years. The project was so successful that an additional $4 million dollar grant was given to expand the number of units. The mobile units provide eye exams for pre-school children at their schools. Glorya reached out to Los Angeles City Librarian John Szabo to arrange for fifteen libraries to be included in the mobile unit eye exam program. Within five years, over 90,000 pre-schoolers were tested by retired eye physicians. The program continues to expand its reach today.

Glorya’s concern for the health and well-being of young and old has been lifelong. In the 1980s, she provided seed money for the first center for women struggling with domestic violence in downtown Los Angeles. When the 1994 earthquake destroyed Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, she marched into the health center foundation to offer assistance, donating funds for a beautiful reception area in the new inpatient pavilion.

The Wende Museum

Recently, Glorya has undertaken an exciting project to build a community center with the Wende Museum, a collections-based research and education institute in Culver City that preserves Cold War artifacts and history, making resources available to scholars and applying historical lessons of the past to the present. The Glorya Kaufman Creative Community Center will bring education and culture to people who live throughout West Los Angeles. The Wende Museum Archives will house Glorya’s personal collections and private papers in perpetuity.