Elizabeth Shea Dance

Reviewed as “a remarkable contemporary dance display,” Elizabeth Shea is a dance artist/scholar/educator whose work has been produced by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and presented at numerous festivals and major cities across the USA, as well as in Australia, Israel, and China. Liz has been a guest artist for many professional companies, most recently as a collaborator with NYC-based Stefanie Nelson Dancegroup, and she creates extensively in new media and film, screening her work at film festivals internationally; awards include Best Choreography, Best Dance Film, and Best Ensemble. Liz specializes in somatic theory and practice, teaching her self-developed system, SomaLab®, a framework for inclusive movement practice, and choreographic methods at workshops both home and abroad, including the Royal Academy of Dance in London, and Dance Italia, in Lucca, Italy. A 500-hour RYT, Liz is Professor and Director of Contemporary Dance at Indiana University.

Elizabeth Shea Dance is a project-based chamber ensemble who seek new ways to tell human stories. Collaboration and co-creation lie at the center of each new artistic experience, the movers’ embodied research deeply informing the dance-making process. Somatic investigation promotes kinesthetic empathy, with the resultant work reflective of each voice. The company has performed at venues across the US and abroad, and on many university and college campuses. The ensemble collaborated with lighting designer Allen Hahn for Breath|Light|Stone, which has been an official selection at international film festivals across the globe, and was invited to perform Ascension, a 25-minute site-specific work created in honor of the grand re-opening of the Eskenazi Museum of Art designed by I.M. Pei. Ascension was seen by over 1,000 people and was reviewed as “an incredible awakening that brings us into the embrace of Mr. Pei, whose spirit very much floats throughout the structure.”