Biographical note on Lisa Kraus

Lisa Kraus is a choreographer, teacher, and writer whose career has included dancing as a member of the Trisha Brown Dance Company, choreographing and performing extensively with her own company and as an independent, teaching at universities and arts centers, and writing reviews, features and essays on dance for internet and print publication. She has trained in many forms and aesthetics including Graham technique, Indonesian dance, and the work of the Judson Church experimentalists.

Ms. Kraus has a longstanding professional relationship with the Netherlands. She first performed at major Dutch venues with the Trisha Brown Dance Company in a 1980 tour organized by the Netherlands Theater Institute. That same year, she began a ten-year association with School for New Dance Development as an annually-invited guest teacher. In 1990 she relocated to the Netherlands to teach dance technique, composition, and improvisation at the European Dance Development Center in Arnhem for nearly a decade. Her recent public dialogue with Anouk van Dijk at Philadelphia’s Susan Hess Studio rekindled her curiosity about the similarities and differences in U.S. and Dutch culture.

Ms. Kraus has created over 30 performance works, several with her former New York-based company featuring John Jasperse, Sasha Waltz and Meg Stuart. Presented by venues across the U.S., Europe and Australia including London’s Dance Umbrella, Sydney’s Performance Gallery, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) and New York’s Danspace Project, Dance Theater Workshop, the Kitchen, and P.S. 122, her work has been awarded support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Dance Advance, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and other foundations and private sponsors. A resident of the Philadelphia area since 2000, she is currently on the faculty of Swarthmore College and is the New Edge Resident Artist in Dance at the Community Education Center, developing the Partita Project, a work in collaboration with virtuoso violinist Diane Monroe.

Lisa Kraus began writing to chronicle her teaching of Trisha Brown’s Glacial Decoy to the Paris Opera Ballet in 2003. Since then she has become one of two main dance critics for the Philadelphia Inquirer and is a frequent contributor to Dance Magazine where she has written on such subjects as “Americans Abroad” (April 2006) about U.S. dance artists based in Europe. Recent writings have also appeared in Dance Research Journal, the Contact Quarterly, and the Dance Insider.