Lisa Kraus

Lisa Kraus’s career has included performing with the Trisha Brown Dance Company, choreographing and performing for her own company and as an independent, teaching at universities and arts centers, presenting the work of other artists as Coordinator of the Bryn Mawr College Performing Arts Series, and writing reviews, features and essays on dance for internet and print publication.

With TBDC she appeared in television and film projects including Beyond the Mainstream and created roles in several works including Glacial Decoy (1979) which she taught the Paris Opera Ballet and later Stephen Petronio Company. Her desire to communicate about this experience kick-started her writing on the weblog “Decoy Among the Swans.” Since 2004 she has written for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Dance Magazine, Dance Research Journal, the Contact Quarterly, the Dance Insider, the Dance Advance Publications & Research site and her “Writing My Dancing Life” blog. She was a 2010 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in Dance Criticism. She co-founded thINKingDANCE and was its director and editor-in-chief from 2011 - 2014.

As a resident of the Philadelphia area since 2000, she began developing dance projects over multi-year timeframes including the Partita Project which animated the historic Mt. Pleasant Mansion and Red Thread, inspired by women’s quilting circles. Having been presented by such venues as the Kitchen, DTW and Danspace in New York; Philadelphia Dance Projects, the Painted Bride and CEC in Philadelphia; Sushi in San Diego, London’s Dance Umbrella, the American Center in Paris, and Sydney’s Dance Exchange and supported by funders like the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage through Dance Advance, the Independence and Leeway Foundations, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts,  she has a strong basis from which to advocate for the work of other artists.