Glorya Kaufman, the committed, passionate arts and health donor in Los Angeles who passed away at age 95 in August, was in the news again this month. The Glorya Kaufman Foundation’s latest bequest to the city — a landmark new wellness center with free programming for the public in L.A.’s Culver City area — officially opened September 6. Kaufman, who leaves behind a legacy of giving including support for dance schools and series, art museums and theaters, eye clinics and more, provided the lead gift for the new $17 million Glorya Kaufman Community Center and wellness hub, and committed $6 million toward programming there.
This gift reflects Kaufman’s dual philanthropic focus on arts and care — healthcare and wellbeing, and caring for the disadvantaged. It’s also a nice reminder of her contributions in a city that has so many big-time funders, it can be hard to keep track.
In 2012, Kaufman gave $20 million to L.A’s signature downtown music and culture complex, the Music Center, to support stagings of top-tier dancers and dance companies through “Glorya Kaufman Presents Dance at the Music Center.” This was the largest donation in L.A.’s dance history, and has brought to the city the Joffrey Ballet, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, the Royal Ballet, and more. Kaufman created and endowed the USC Glorya Kaufman School of Dance, which opened in 2015, and built the home for it, the Glorya Kaufman International Dance Center. Back in 1999, she gave $18 million to restore the UCLA Women’s Gym, now the Glorya Kaufman Hall – the largest individual gift the university had received outside the health sciences, and the largest arts donation to the UC system back then.
Still, she remained less well-known to the general public and even many in the philanthrosphere than leading L.A. arts funders like Eli Broad and Wallis Annenberg. Part of the reason was her foundation’s small size compared to the city’s powerhouse arts philanthropies, which speaks to the scale of arts giving in L.A. The Glorya Kaufman Foundation listed its total assets as $8.52 million as of 2023; compare that to the Annenberg Foundation’s $1.46 billion and Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation’s $1.82 billion for the same year. A genuinely major donor like Kaufman can remain relatively low profile when in company with these others.
Glorya Kaufman’s L.A. giving and beyond
Kaufman, who was born Glorya Pinkis in Detroit, Michigan, married building contractor Donald Bruce Kaufman in the 1950s. Her fortune came from the home construction company she helped him launch, which then expanded during the post-war boom years. Donald Kaufman founded Kaufman and Broad (later KB Homes) with Eli Broad, who had been his accountant. It became the first publicly traded home building company on the NYSE.
The Kaufmans moved west to expand the business, and eventually settled in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles. In 1983, Donald Kaufman died in an airplane accident while flying his experimental bi-plane Witch-Hawk. The Kaufmans’ son-in-law Eyal also was killed in the tragic accident; their daughter Gayl, Eyal’s wife, was eight months pregnant at the time, and went on to give birth to Glorya Kaufman’s first grandchild. As the foundation puts it, Glorya Kaufman recovered from the trauma and loss of her life partner by “pouring her energies into philanthropy.” She made an initial gift to build a new 10,000-square-foot library in Brentwood, the Donald Bruce Kaufman Brentwood Library, which replaced an old, smaller one, to honor her husband, who loved to read.
She founded the Glorya Kaufman Dance Foundation in 2008, having already established herself as a committed donor across L.A. It was renamed the Glorya Kaufman Foundation in 2018 to better reflect its range of giving beyond dance. The Entertainment Community Fund awarded Kaufman a Medal of Honor in 2023.
Kaufman was a very personal donor, with her philanthropy stemming from her love of dance and her experience with strabismus as a child — a medical condition in which a person’s eyes fail to track together and that requires surgery to fix. She funded the eye clinic at the Venice Family Clinic and donated money to the USC Eye Clinic to perform surgeries to correct misalignment on children from infancy to age 22. She also made a variety of grants to support dance classes, schools, education and care for underserved, low-income children and those with developmental differences, as well as one-time donations to meet a range of needs. Outside of L.A., she funded the Glorya Kaufman Dance Studio at The Juilliard School in New York and supported four lifetime endowments for Fordham University/Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater school.
The foundation’s homepage includes a quote from her: “Physical and spiritual wellbeing are the centerpiece of my philanthropic aspirations. My ability to touch communities in a deeply personal way gives me immeasurable joy.”
Related Inside Philanthropy Resources:
For Subscribers Only
Modern wellness in a museum of Cold War history? Om to that
Kaufman’s latest big gift was the wellness center, expanding her posthumous reach to the general public, even those who know nothing about dance. Located in a formerly derelict building across the sculpture garden from the Wende Museum of the Cold War in Culver City, the Glorya Kaufman Community Center will offer a variety of free, wellness-based activities ranging from yoga, guided meditations and sound baths to healing writing workshops for L.A. wildfire victims, dance and movement classes, and a class on how to make matcha tea. The renovation of the old building into the new center included the addition of two floors and a roof garden above an existing, out-of-use theater, while maintaining the historic wooden beams of the original space.
You wouldn’t necessarily go to a war museum to do a down dog, but as the Los Angeles Times’ Debra Vankin reported earlier this month, “Wellness at museums is on the rise,” and “the 7,500-square-foot Glorya Kaufman Community Center takes it to the next level.” Other “next-level” features include a 150-seat theater, free psychotherapy with licensed psychologists, and a soon-to-be-served menu of free food. The center also will host and help coordinate the Wende’s nonprofit convenings, workshops, and an annual presentation of the Nonprofit Transformation Prize, honoring a Culver City nonprofit serving vulnerable people.
While some other L.A. arts institutions offer weekly mindfulness classes or occasional forest bathing, the Glorya Kaufman Community Center is aiming for near-daily offerings. Wellness practitioners also can use the space to offer free-to-the-public events.
Other funders of the center include the Ahmanson Foundation, Rose Hills Foundation, Ralph M. Parsons Foundation, Jennifer N. Pritzker, Pritzker Military Foundation, Los Angeles County Arts Foundation, the Victor Family, the Howard & Irene Levine Foundation, the Zeiss Family, Tobey Cotsen, Thomas E. Backer and the City of Culver City, which donated the plot of land.
Why we need wellness now
The Wende Museum’s founder and executive director Justin Jampol told the L.A. Times that the community center is particularly important in this moment of federal cutbacks to the arts and public health. “The things that get cut first are the things people need most: self-care, eating right, having opportunities for art and culture, going to the theater — those are stress relievers. So the idea is to try and address that here in our own small way. . . It’s about these moments of joy and happiness and togetherness amidst awfulness.”
As Kaufman herself says in a video recording from The Glorya Kaufman Archive hosted on the foundation’s website: “It was always about making life better for others. You get so much more out of being generous and kind than you do out of being selfish and jealous.” A good note in these troubling times.
