Movers & Shapers: Liz Lerman

Liz Lerman is a choreographer, performer, writer, teacher, social activist, thought leader and inspirational speaker. She has spent the past four decades making her artistic research personal, funny, intellectually vivid, and up-to-the-minute. Her choreography has examined everything from her days as a go-go dancer in 1974, to investigating the matters of our origins by putting dancers in the tunnels of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN-Switzerland.

A key aspect of her artistry is opening her process to everyone from shipbuilders to physicists, construction workers to ballerinas, resulting in both research and experiences 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.

In 2016, Liz was named the first Institute Professor at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University. There, she is also a Senior Global Futures Scientist at the Global Institute of Sustainability and Innovation, a faculty affiliate in Jewish Studies and a fellow at the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy. She is currently a senior fellow at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Liz 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.

Most recently, she and her dancers created and performed Wicked Bodies, a piece inspired by powerful and grotesque images of women’s bodies over multiple historic periods. Her work premiered April 2022 at the Green Music Center at Sonoma State University. It toured to Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in August, Arizona State University’s ASU Gammage Theater in September and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in October. Wicked Bodies, an intimate spectacle, brings together several consistent themes of Liz’s choreographic output including the invisible ways and means of feminine thinking and action which have been celebrated, erased, or criminalized; legal systems that attempt but often fail to bend our actions towards a fairer and more just world; and how a group of intergenerational artists brings their personal lives to the stage within characters that are imagining futures.

Among her current projects is building the Atlas of Creative Tools, an online resource intended to create a better, more interesting realm of learning and discovery. Users will be able to interact with dozens of tools and learn how to use them. Resources will include art-making techniques, essays and stories about the tools, examples of their applications and an extensive glossary.

Liz’s most recent book, Critique is Creative: The Critical Response Process in Theory and Action (with co-author John Borstel), was published just last year. It addresses the Critical Response Process, a communication system for giving and receiving feedback that Liz invented decades ago as an antidote to kind of comments that can kill inspiration and rob a creative person of their agency.

Her signature blend of dance, spoken word, music, technology, social commentary and audience involvement has garnered her countless awards and honors, including most recently a Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2017 Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award and a MacArthur "Genius" award in 2002.

One reviewer had this to say about Liz: “She’s not so easy to sum up; but among the things that go into her makeup are assuredly an impish sense of humor (she could have been a fine stand-up comedian), an almost metaphysical intensity and seriousness, the imagination of a born fabulist, manic energy and no small dollop of plain old chutzpah.”