Movers & Shapers: Liz Gerring

Liz Gerring was born in San Francisco in 1965. She grew up in the Los Angeles area and began studying dance when she was thirteen. In high school she studied at the Cornish Institute in Seattle. In 1987, she was awarded a BFA from the Juilliard School. With Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown having an ever evolving and profound influence on her own frank aesthetic, she formed the Liz Gerring Dance Company in 1998, after a brief career detour in bicycle racing. Gerring was awarded the Jacob’s Pillow Prize in June 2015, and a Joyce Theater Residency and Creation award in the same year. In 2016/17 she was awarded a New York City Center Choreographic Fellowship. Of her work, Gerring says: “For most of my life I have been engaged in the pursuit of movement for its own sake. Developing an early interest in abstraction as the primary means to expression, I have focused my work on the body and its presentation through space and time.”