Liz Lerman

Liz Lerman is a choreographer, performer, writer, educator and speaker and the recipient of numerous honors, including a 2002 MacArthur "Genius Grant"Fellowship and a 2011 United States Artists Ford Fellowship in Dance. A key aspect of her artistry is opening her process to various publics from shipbuilders to physicists, construction workers to ballerinas, resulting in both research and outcomes that are participatory, relevant, urgent and usable by others. She founded Liz Lerman Dance Exchange in 1976 and cultivated the company's unique multi-generational ensemble into a leading force in contemporary dance until 2011.

 

Liz was recently an artist-in-residence and visiting lecturer at Harvard University, and her current work Healing Wars just finished touring across the U.S. Liz conducts residencies on the Critical Response Process, creative research, the intersection of art and science, and the building of narrative within dance performance at such institutions as Yale School of Drama, Wesleyan University, University of Maryland–College Park, Guildhall School of Music and Drama and the National Theatre Studio, among many others. Her collection of essays, Hiking the Horizontal: Field Notes from a Choreographer, was published in 2011 by Wesleyan University Press and released in paperback in 2014.