Biography

November 1, 1957

David H. Gere

Younger brother of Richard Gere.

Gere arrived at UCLA in 1993 via Ohio and India. He grew up in a small town in central New York, and has since studied religion at Ohio's Oberlin, ethnomusicology at the University of Hawaii and dance history at UC Riverside. As a young man, he ventured to India, living in Tamilnadu and learning the local language, dances and music. He started his career as a performing arts critic in San Francisco. In 2004, he went to Bangalore on a Fulbright scholarship to witness artist interventions in India's HIV/AIDS epidemic. He organized a meeting of artists from around the country to share basic ideas and practices, and to bring everyone up to date on the most current health information. This turned him from research turned into activism. So then he started the UCLA's Art and Global Health Center, which is an umbrella for all kinds of research, ranging from creating new models for intervention to working with social scientists to study those models for effectiveness.