Slobodan Dan Paich has multiple ongoing vocations: as comparative cultural studies scholar, he has delivered numerous papers at international conferences, as a presenter and as keynote speaker. His presentations are based on his courses, lectures, and research since 1969, addressing tangible and intangible heritage, comparative cultural studies, and the migration of techniques and ideas. The courses he initiated in 1969 at the university level broadened the scope of art history into the History of Art and Ideas. These courses included geographies larger than the European cultural sphere, and an interdisciplinary, across-time curriculum was developed to include ancient and indigenous people, viewed as differently cultured, ingenious, and refined, rather than primitive.
Mr. Paich was born in Yugoslavia after the Second World War. He lived in England from 1967 to 1985. In London, Mr. Paich taught the History of Art and Ideas, Design, and Art Studio from 1969 to 1985. From 1985 to 1992, he taught at the University of California at Berkeley. He served as a board member of the Society of Founders of the International Peace University in Berlin/Vienna from 1996 to 2002, and chaired the Committee on Arts and Culture. He succeeded Yehudi Menuhin in this role and passed it on to Ishmael Ivo at the end of his tenure. Currently, as well as being founder and Artistic and Executive Director of Artship Foundation since 1992, he is Visiting Professor in Anthropology-Cultural Studies Section, Victor Babes University of Medicine and Pharmacy, Timisoara, Romania.
As theater director, Mr. Paich is a co-founder and the artistic director of the Artship Ensemble (previously Augustino Dance Theater), where he has choreographed and directed since 1988 in the USA. Before immigrating to England from his native Yugoslavia, Mr. Paich started a number of experimental theater groups based on movement, folkloric dance, and storytelling that propelled him to leave for London in 1967. Since immigrating to the United States in 1985, Mr. Paich has been involved in extending performing and visual arts into the community. At TanzFabrik in Berlin, he taught acting for dancers and performance for visual artists. Slobodan is a teacher of multidisciplinary arts and has worked in theater all his life. He is never too far from a rehearsal process. He has received many awards for art, performance, and community initiative wherever he has lived and worked.
As a visual artist since 1969, Mr. Paich has participated in one or two exhibitions a year and in the last ten years has been working with The Bonnafont Gallery in San Francisco. He has exhibited at London’s Institute for Contemporary Arts in the sixties and Serpentine Gallery in the seventies; Paris’ Le Salon des Nations and the Venice’s Biennale in the eighties.