Liz Gerring

Liz Gerring is an American choreographer known for rigorous abstract movement and sustained collaborations between dance, music and visual design. Born in San Francisco in 1965, she began studying dance at thirteen and later trained at the Cornish Institute in Seattle before earning a BFA from the Juilliard School in 1987, where she studied with Kazuko Hirabayashi and Doris Rudko.

In March 1998, Gerring presented a four-hour movement installation before founding Liz Gerring Dance Company. That early work signaled her abiding interests: duration, bodies in space, and accumulated action foregrounded over narrative. She built the New York-based ensemble through recurring circles of performers, designers and musicians, establishing a practice where collaborators became compositional resources rather than decorative supports.

Composer Michael J. Schumacher emerged as a key partner. Their exploration of dance and music's mutual dependence shaped *she dreams in code*, which premiered at Baryshnikov Arts Center in October 2011 and played Jacob's Pillow in August 2012—the company's official festival debut. The 2013 work *glacier*, set to an original Schumacher score, consolidated Gerring's reputation for large-scale abstract form and demanding physicality. In 2014, *glacier* received a New York Dance and Performance Award nomination; the following year, Gerring received the Jacob's Pillow Dance Award.

Her practice has expanded through stage works and installations including *Horizon*, *Field*, *Harbor*, *Dialogue*, *Installation III: red green blue & grey* and *INTERSECTION*. The active company catalog reflects an ongoing investigation of how movement interacts with sound, video, architecture and visual design. Dancers swing, bound, balance and redirect through composed space where one body's pathway can trigger another's—action reads as an evolving system rather than a sequence of isolated events. Gerring remains President and Choreographer of her company, maintaining a body of work that makes choreographic thinking visible through trained bodies, precise timing and changing scale.