Liz Lerman
Bio
Liz Lerman is an influential choreographer, performer, writer, educator and speaker. She is the recipient of numerous honors, including a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship, 2002 MacArthur Genius Grant, 2011 United States Artists Ford Fellowship in Dance, 2017 Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award. She has been a Deutsch Fellow and in 2023 she was honored as a Dance Magazine Award winner. 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.
She was an artist-in-residence and visiting lecturer at Harvard University in 2011, and her acclaimed work, "Healing Wars," toured across the US in 2014-15. Lerman conducts residencies on Critical Response Process, creative research, the intersection of art and science, and the building of narrative within dance performance at such institutions as Harvard University, Yale School of Drama, Wesleyan University, Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and the National Theatre Studio, among 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. In 2016, Lerman was named the first Institute Professor at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University, where she is building a new ensemble lab focused on creative research.