Born in upstate New York, Liz received her first dance education at Albany Dance Institute and the School of American Ballet. She graduated from Harvard University with a Bachelor degree in physics and completed her Master degree at The Ohio State University in dance. Reconciliation of art and science continues to be a central tenet of her work.
Liz is currently a doctoral student at the Graduate School of the Arts in Bern. Her thesis takes the scientific concept of entrainment --the capacity of systems to synchronize-- as an opener: asking what philosophy of movement and the body is necessary to theorize practitioners' experience of entrainment in contemporary dance, delaying the theoretical problem of understanding whether improvisation and choreography are justifiably distinct or co-operative processes, and yielding when the melt of examples and severed discourses is ready to deal with subjectivity, material, and process in the real of dancing together.
Liz was invited by William Forsythe to join Ballet Frankfurt/The Forsythe Company, where she was a dancer from 2004 - 2012. She has also performed with Marcus Schulkind, Sebastian Matthias, and Collective Ludwig. Working as a freelance choreographer, her recent works include the Ingeborg Ruvina Project at Theater Rigiblick in Zürich, Josefine at Opera Krefeld and Don’t Play! Eine Spectralgymnastic at the Schaubühne Lindenfels in Leipzig. Her performance-lecture series “Dance | SPEAK TO ME!” was produced by Künstlerhaus Mousonturm in 2014. As a dramaturg she has worked with William Forsythe on Sider, the collective MaMaZa on Eifo Efi, as well on projects in design and photography. In 2013 she was awarded a fellowship for dramaturgy from Akademie Musiktheater Heute.
Liz’s writing on dance is published in diverse sources, including Contact Quarterly, the International Journal of Digital Media and Performance, Etcetera Magazine and the book Theater Ohne Fluchtpunkt. She is also engaged in new forms of digital and internet publishing, for example as a consultant to the online project Synchronous Objects and the workgroup Dance Engaging Science.
As a teacher she has offered workshops and lectures internationally, including at the Universität Bern, the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Frankfurt am Main, The Croatian Institute for Movement and Dance (HIPP) and Stanford University. Liz teaches regularly in Frankfurt for Tanzlabor21 at Künstlerhaus Mousonturm. Liz was a member of the project InnoLernenTanz at the Palucca Hochschule and was on faculty at Emerson College in Boston. She is certified instructor of the GYROTONIC® method and a certified Pilates Mat instructor from the Kane School of Core Integration in New York City.
Liz’s current projects adhere to the following principles: non-hierarchical work structures (i.e. teamwork, collaboration, working alone); working productively with doubt towards invention; simultaneously pursuing aesthetic, embodied, and discursive rigor; meaningful communication to novices and experts; and maintaining a sense of humor. Her research interests include aesthetics and metaphysics of choreography, entrainment, object usage, documentation of collective practice, musicality, and notation forms.