Liz Lerman

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

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.

Critical Response Process has a significant international presence, with 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."

Called by the Washington Post “the source of an epochal revolution in the scope and purposes of dance art,” she and her dancers have collaborated with shipbuilders, physicists, construction workers, and cancer researchers. In 2002 she won the MacArthur Genius Grant; in 2009, the Jack P. Blaney Award in Dialogue acknowledged her outstanding leadership, creativity, and dedication to melding dialogue with dance; and the 2017 Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award.

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

She founded the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange in 1976 and led the company's multi-generational ensemble until July 2011, when Lerman passed the leadership of her company to Cassie Meador; the company is now called simply Dance Exchange. .

Liz Lerman (born 1947 in Los Angeles, CA) is an American choreographer and founder of Liz Lerman Dance Exchange .

Liz Lerman was born in Los Angeles, California on Christmas Day, 1947. Her father Philip was an organizer and activist, and her mother was an artist. Though her family moved several times when she was growing up, much of her early education was spent in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. 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 received her B.A. in dance from the University of Maryland and an M.A. in dance from George Washington University.