Liz Lerman is a choreographer, performer, writer, educator and speaker. From a piece about her days as a go-go dancer in 1974 to a recent investigation of origins that included putting dancers in the tunnels of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, she has spent the past four decades making her artistic research personal, funny, intellectually vivid, and up to the minute. 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, when she handed the artistic leadership of the company over to the next generation of Dance Exchange artists. Now she is pursuing new projects with fresh partnerships, including a recent semester at Harvard University as an artist-in-residence; initiating the National Civil War Project which pairs theaters and universities to create new work and new research related to our civil war; the new work Healing Wars, an investigation of the impact of war on medicine (2014); the genre-twisting work Blood, Muscle, Bone with Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and Urban Bush Women; work in London with Sadler's Wells Theatre, the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, the National Theatre Studio, and the London Sinfonietta; and an online project called "The Treadmill Tapes: Ideas on the Move." In 2013 she curated Wesleyan University's symposium "Innovations: Intersection of Art and Science," bringing together teams of artists and scientists from North America to present their methods and findings.
Hiking the Horizontal: Field Notes from a Choreographer, Liz's collection of essays, was published in 2011 by Wesleyan University Press and released in paperback in 2014.
Liz has been the recipient of numerous honors, including a 2002 MacArthur "Genius Grant" Fellowship, a 2011 United States Artists Ford Fellowship in Dance, and the 2014 Dance/USA Honor Award. Her work has been commissioned by Harvard Law School, the Lincoln Center, American Dance Festival, and the Kennedy Center among many others.
Born in Los Angeles and raised in Milwaukee, Liz attended Bennington College and Brandeis University, received her BA in dance from the University of Maryland, and an MA in dance from George Washington University. She is married to storyteller Jon Spelman. Their daughter lives in southeast Asia where she works as a photo-journalist.
For more information: http://lizlerman.com/