About MP+D

Located in San Francisco, MP+D is the only independent, non-profit arts organization in the United States devoted to the history of performing arts and theatrical design. Founded in 1947 by Russell Hartley, a dancer and designer with the San Francisco Ballet, the organization was long known as the San Francisco Performing Arts Library & Museum (SFPALM) until it changed its name to Museum of Performance + Design in 2007. MP+D has served the arts community for nearly seventy years as a cultural resource and an archive for some of our nation's most important performance related materials. MP+D manages a rare collection of 3.5M items on the history of performances in San Francisco and the Bay Area, hosts public programs onsite with other resources online:

Created in 1988 by Jeff Friedman, Ph.D., the Legacy Oral History Program has been recognized nationally and internationally as a model program of performing arts documentation using oral history methods. Legacy oral histories are full-life histories with an emphasis on the narrator's personal experience as it relates to the performing arts. Selected Legacy narrators are knowledge-holders and culture-bearers who represent important creative and performance practices in dance, music or theater. Many narrators are elderly or in some way at risk.

The Legacy Oral Histories are available at the Museum of Performance + Design. Most  have been published in hardbound archival-quality books that contain edited text, photographs and numerous tools to facilitate research: introductions by peers, narrator and interviewer biographies, interview history, historical timeline, appendices, detailed table of contents and a name/place index.

For more information about MP+D, its holdings and activities visit www.mpdsf.org or contact us directly at info@mpdsf.org.