Next level visionaries

MacArthur Genius Grant recipient Liz Lerman is a choreographer, performer, author, educator and speaker. From a piece about her days as a go-go dancer in 1974 to an 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. Her production, Healing Wars, finished touring the US in 2015. Her most recent work, Wicked Bodies, will premiere in April 2022.

Liz conducts residencies on creative research, the intersection of art and science, narrative in dance performance, and the Critical Response Process, a facilitated method for guiding feedback on creative works in progress that she devised in 1990. Hosts include Harvard University, Yale School of Drama, Wesleyan University, Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and the National Theatre Studio among many others.

Liz’s book, Teaching Dance to Senior Adults was published in 1984, and 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, a 2011 United States Artists Ford Fellowship in Dance, and the 2017 Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award. Her work has been commissioned by the Harvard Law School, the Lincoln Center, American Dance Festival, and the Kennedy Center, among many others. Her latest book, Critique is Creative: The Critical Response Process in Theory and Action, is set for release in July 2022.

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 is a documentary journalist and filmmaker.

Liz is a fellow at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at ASU, and a former fellow at the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation. In 2016 Liz was named the first Institute Professor at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University.