Born in Seattle, Washington on 29/08/1956. He studied Spanish dance under Verla Flowers and ballet under various teachers including Perry Brunson. He settled in New York in 1976, where, in the early years of his career as a dancer, he worked with the dance groups Hannah Kahn, Laura Dean, Eliot Feld and Lar Lubovitch. In 1980, he created the "Mark Morris Dance Group." He succeeded Maurice Béjart as Director of Dance at the Theatre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels (1988-1991), creating ballets such as L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato set to the Handel oratorio (1988), a dance version of the opera Dido and Aeneas by Purcell (1989), and The Hard Nut , a pop adaptation of the ballet The Nutcracker (1991). In 1990, together with Mikhail Baryshnikov, he founded the White Oak Dance Project. He has worked with the San Francisco Ballet, the American Ballet Theatre, Boston Ballet, the Metropolitan Opera House, the National Opera of England and the Royal Opera House in London, among others. He directed and choreographed many operas including Salome, Orpheus and Eurydice [Orfeo ed Euridice], The Marriage of Figaro [Le nozze di Figaro], King Arthur, Idomeneo, King of Crete [Idomeneo, re di Creta] etc. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2013 he assumed the position of music director of the Ojai Music Festival. He has received many awards for his artistic contribution to dance. For the Greek National Opera, he choreographed the opera Nixon in China (Athens Concert Hall, 2006-07).