Liz Lerman

Liz Lerman was born in Los Angeles on December 25, 1947, and moved with her family to Washington, D.C., where she began dance classes. In 1962, while attending Interlochen Arts Camp, she performed in a ballet program for President John F. Kennedy. She studied at Bennington College and Brandeis University before earning a BA in dance from the University of Maryland in 1970.

From 1970 to 1973, Lerman taught at Sandy Spring Friends School and experimented with making movement part of the wider educational environment. A period in New York followed, where she has described supporting her training through go-go dancing and using that work to think about the performer–audience relationship. These experiences helped form a career-long question: who gets to dance, and under what conditions is dancing valued?

In 1976 she founded Liz Lerman Dance Exchange in the Washington, D.C., area. The company became known for a multigenerational ensemble and for projects shaped with people outside conventional concert-dance institutions. Her graduate research at George Washington University led to the 1984 book *Teaching Dance to Senior Adults*. Work with older adults became one important strand in a broader intergenerational practice that investigated civic life, memory, labor, and lived experience.

During the 1980s and 1990s, Lerman developed "docudances," using research, testimony, text, and movement to investigate public subjects. *Still Crossing*, created for the Statue of Liberty centennial in 1986, and *The Shipyard Project*, made with the Portsmouth community in 1996, placed migration and labor inside choreographic structures. In the mid-1990s, she articulated Critical Response Process, a four-step feedback method that separates statements of meaning, artist questions, neutral questions, and permissioned opinions. This structured approach has traveled far beyond dance.

The large-scale *Hallelujah* project unfolded across fifteen communities from 1998 to 2002. In 2002, the MacArthur Foundation recognized Lerman for building dance from lived experience and strengthening connections across ages and communities. Later projects continued to place dance in dialogue with specialized knowledge: *Small Dances About Big Ideas*, created for Harvard Law School's sixtieth-anniversary commission on the Nuremberg trials in 2005, and works like *Ferocious Beauty: Genome* and *The Matter of Origins* that brought choreographic inquiry into conversation with genetics and physics.

Lerman transferred Dance Exchange's artistic leadership to a new generation in 2011 and continued as an independent artist, writer, and educator. She created *Healing Wars* in 2014, joined Arizona State University in 2016, and premiered *Wicked Bodies* in 2022. In 2017 she received both the Jacob's Pillow Dance Award and the American Dance Festival distinguished teaching honor. Her later work includes the Atlas of Creative Tools, Legacy Unboxed, and *My Body is a Library*. In 2023 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 2024 a Dance Magazine Award.