[1] Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, for more than four decades she has been a performer, director, and teacher of dance and theater, particularly involved with youth and community arts projects.
[6] Having begun her career as a performer while still a child,[2][7] after graduation she moved to New York City, where she studied ballet and made her debut as a choreographer in 1963, participating in the avant-garde Judson Dance Theater workshops.
[8][9] A related 26-minute documentary film by Richard Rutkowski and Wilson, with the same title as the live work and including excerpts from the Guggenheim performance, premiered on Arte TV in France and the Sundance Channel in the U.S. in 2010, and an hour-long documentary, The Space in Back of You,[10] including an interview with Blank,[11] premiered in January 2012 at Lincoln Center's film festival, Dance on Camera, where it was nominated for a jury prize.
Beginning with a staged reading at Mehran Restaurant in Newark, California, in 2004,[13] productions she directed include a 2009 showcase at Berkeley Repertory Theatre and its Off-Broadway debut, on September 11, 2009, at the Nuyorican Poets Café,[2][14][15] an appearance at the 2010 MuslimFest in Mississauga, Canada, the Kennedy Center's Millennium Hall in Washington DC, on November 14, 2010,[16] and as anchor of the 9/11 Performance Project at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater in New York, in September 2011.
[19] She directed the multidisciplinary work by Yuri Kageyama, News From Fukushima: Meditation on an Under-Reported Catastrophe by a Poet, which was premiered at the off-Broadway theater La MaMa in 2015 and developed further in 2017 at Z Space in San Francisco.
[20] Blank directed and choreographed The Slave Who Loved Caviar by Ishmael Reed, which premiered at Theater for the New City in New York on December 23, 2021, running until January 9, 2022.
[26] Based upon her experiences of teaching and directing young artists, Blank co-authored a performance arts handbook, Live On Stage!,[27] with Jody Roberts (1997 and 2000, Dale Seymour Publications).
"[33] According to Publishers Weekly, it is "a captivating, multifarious look at the American experience through its short fiction",[34] while January Magazine called it "an important book ... a collection intended to mark our consciousness and our hearts.
Other titles Blank has supervised include Black Girl from Tannery Flats (2003), the memoir of her mother-in-law, Thelma V. Reed;[37][38] New and Collected Poems by Kathryn Takara (2003), poetry collections from four women poets based in northern California: Under Burning White Sky (2005) by Boadiba, Swallowing Watermelons by Karla Brundage (2006),[39] City Beautiful by Tennessee Reed (2006),[40] and After Altamira by Neli Moody (2006);[41] and Maggie 3, a novel by Alison Mills Newman (2007).