Liz Lerman

Liz Lerman (born 1947 in Los Angeles, CA) is an American dance choreographer, founder of the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange and creator of the Critical Response Process.

Early life
Liz Lerman was born in Los Angeles, California, on December 25, 1947. When she was 14 years old, she danced in Washington, DC, for President Kennedy as part of a group from the National Music Camp in Interlochen, Michigan. She attended Bennington College, where she studied under Martha Wittman, who would later become a company member of Dance Exchange. She graduated with a B.A. in dance from the University of Maryland and an M.A. in dance from George Washington University.

Career
She founded the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange in 1976 and led the company's multi-generational ensemble until July 2011, when Lerman was succeeded by Cassie Meador; the company is now called Dance Exchange.

Under Lerman's leadership, Dance Exchange appeared across the U.S. at venues including National Cathedral, Kennedy Center Opera House, Millennium Stage, Lansburgh Theatre, Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, Harvard University, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

Lerman's early work focused on including older dancers alongside more traditional young performers and using personal narrative. Her later-career work has focused on questions of science from genomics, high-energy physics, and the physical and psychic wounds of war. She and her dancers have collaborated with shipbuilders, physicists, construction workers, and cancer researchers.

In January 2016, Lerman joined the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona as Institute Professor to lead programs and courses that span disciplines across ASU.

Tools
Lerman defines and shares the "tools" that result from her artistic process. According to Lerman, a "tool" is a piece of information that is detached from other concepts and can be applied to many situations. Tools are often challenges or reminders, including “Rattle around in someone else’s universe”; “Turn discomfort into inquiry”; “Nothing is too small to notice”.

At Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, her tool sharing took the form of an online "Toolbox," with a later iteration called "D-Lab" that aimed to make certain tools widely accessible. Currently, Lerman is developing a new online platform, called "The Atlas of Creative Tools".

Critical Response Process
Lerman created the Critical Response Process (CRP), a method for giving and receiving feedback. Lerman developed the Process in 1990 after realizing artists tended to apologize, rather than ask questions, when presenting unfinished work. The concept was formalized in 2003 through the publication of the book "Critical Response Process: getting useful feedback on anything you make, from dance to dessert" which Lerman co-authored with John Borstel.

CRP has international institutional hosts including the Innovative Conservatoire, the Federation of Scottish Theatres, the London Sinfonietta, the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and Yorkshire Dance in addition to US hosts such as the Yale School of Drama and the Tisch School for the Arts. CRP facilitator-cohorts are in development in Scotland and in Baltimore, Maryland. In 2014, Yorkshire Dance developed a beta-version of an online adaptation of CRP called "respond."

In 2022, Wesleyan University Press will publish Lerman’s second book on CRP, called “Critique is Creative,” also co-authored with John Borstel and including essays by CRP practitioners from around the world.

Awards

 * 2002 MacArthur Genius Grant
 * 2009 Jack P. Blaney Award for Dialogue
 * 2017 Jacob's Pillow Dance Award
 * 2015 American Dance Guild Lifetime Achievement Award
 * 2014 Dance/USA Honor Award
 * 2017 Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award.

Publications

 * Teaching Dance to Senior Adults, 1984
 * Liz Lerman's Critical Response Process: A method for getting useful feedback on anything you make, from dance to dessert (co-author with John Borstel), 2003
 * Hiking the Horizontal: Field Notes from a Choreographer, Wesleyan Press, 2011