Keynotes
“Customizing keynotes is a great pleasure for me: it allows me to sharpen my own thinking, and to make discoveries alongside new people.”
– Liz Lerman
Watch Liz Lerman as Keynote Speaker
Liz has been invited as keynote speaker at gatherings of arts educators, philanthropists, human rights lawyers, nursing home caregivers, and genomic scientists. She has spoken to the National Science Foundation, the Association of Performing Arts Presenters, state arts councils, groups of Jewish leaders and more.
Liz Lerman speaks at Maryland Institute College of Art, March 2023
Liz Lerman and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar speak at The Kennedy Center, 2024
In particular, Liz is interested in speaking on the following topics:
Feedback, Judgment, and Criticism: Creating Frameworks for Change
The moment of giving or receiving feedback is one of heightened emotions and awareness, full of possibilities for change. Liz has been working with feedback methods for years, devising the Critical Response Process: a framework for creating change, managing judgment, and promoting evolution. The beauty of a creative practice is that it requires one to be both very open and very critical. How do we employ our best capacities to be sure that we’re doing both?
Liz will discuss the nature of feedback, the evolutionary necessity of criticism, the personal-institutional-communal intersections of judgment, and the Critical Response Process as one model for making change possible.
Arts, Activism, and the Great Convergence
Explore the historical roots and ongoing innovations that are converging and exploding into new forms of art making, partnership and activism. From site specific to audience immersion, from community engagement to social justice issues, artists are at the core of making and supporting change in small and large ways. Join Liz Lerman in a reflection and conversation to move us forward in how we create, present and produce the art of our time. If desired, this keynote can be structured as a conversation with another dance leader, for example, Urban Bush Women founder and artistic director Jawole Willa Jo Zollar.
Shape & Momentum
Change is constant, yet our values, aesthetics, and creative forms are largely static. Liz will discuss the possibilities that arise when we use movement and our bodies—our very own non-static forms—to interrogate our own thinking. Through our physical existence, we possess the intrinsic knowledge necessary to make evident new ways of working and being in the world.
The Discipline of Creative Research: Using Artistic Practice in Pursuit of Knowledge, Communication, and Joy
Our bodies are a source of learning, interpretation, and discovery. Liz—and, if desired, his keynote can be structured as a conversation with another dance leader—will use her artistic methods to train and support students interested in discovering the bridge between academic and artistic research. They will map a vision for how a movement practice can be an engine that invigorates, animates, and connects students to their personal inquiry and imagination.These investigations will include considering how best to express the varied outcomes of such research, taking into account context, audience, and impact. In this time of increasing hybridization, we are in need of new processes and tools. Working between artistic/creative methods and core scientific principles yields rich new forms to aid the work ahead.
Making Rules, Breaking Rules: Trans-Disciplinary Practices for Tackling Questions Big and Small
In this talk, Liz will investigate her partnerships with collaborators across disciplines and around the world, asking, “When we cross borders, disciplines, and domains, how does this serve our personal inquiry, our professional development, and the building of knowledge?”
Being broad in a narrow world requires considerable creative skill, including holding ideas in multiplicity, making rules as well as breaking rules, and persistent inquiry. What roles can art have in fields as diverse as faith, aging, particle physics, war-time medicine, and human rights law? What happens to our various fields of study and action when we collaborate across disciplines and domains? How does sharing these ideas sustain inquiry, innovation, and the emergence of new knowledge?
Making Art and Making a Life after Hardship, Loss, and Trauma
Creativity, intentional embodiment, and performance can be vital aids in the healing and grieving process. After experiencing hardship, loss, and trauma, we crave methods for processing and understanding our emotions. Liz will discuss how cultivating artistic freedom and embodied awareness—and sharing our discoveries and feelings with others—can help us move forward.
Workshops
Liz is primarily available for keynote engagements. However, she has a number of different workshops that, for groups small and large, can be paired with a keynote.
Sample Workshops
Jewish Work
Our bodies are a space of learning, knowing, and sharing. We will do a series of movement and story-based experiences that acknowledge our histories as well as confront the new ideas and images that have emerged from the day. We will make ourselves visible and bring our whole selves to bear on the questions of gender equity in Judaism. We will work alone, in pairs, and as a group to stand and be together to re-embody memory and put pressure on the future. Everyone is welcome, and all have something to contribute.
Building Counter-Narratives
How your whole body and your whole mind can help sustain the re-imagining that Jewish American theologian, author, and activist Judith Plaskow began, and also how to keep it new and fresh in relation to our real lives. The building of counter-narratives is critical, and the only thing that will save us: counter-narratives on climate, jihadists, on belonging. It’s the counter-narrative that counts…how to we do that?
Looking for a workshop on Critical Response Process? Learn more here.
Residencies
Liz’s history is rich with residencies of all scales and in every imaginable (and unimaginable) location. In recent years, her focus has shifted to teaching teachers. If you are currently interested in a large-scale community residency, please contact the great minds at Dance Exchange. You will be invigorated by their spirit and delighted by their outcomes.
