Ligia Lewis

Ligia Lewis works as an artist, choreographer, dancer and director. She presents her work on stage, in galleries or museums, through film or exhibition format. For Lewis, choreography is the movement of ideas across bodies meticulously conceived, crafted and directed – a political act, a writing against the grain of the racial regime of representationalism and (Black) erasure. Lewis’s works are often marked by physical and emotional intensities by which comedy and tragedy collide. They disrupt normative conceptions of the body and, at the same time, negotiate the ghostly traces of history, memory and the (un-)known. In her work, sonic and visual metaphors meet the body, materialising the enigmatic, the poetic and the dissonant.

Lewis recently finished works include “A Plot / A Scandal” (2022), “Still Not Still” (2021) and “deader than dead” (2020). In 2023, Lewis opened her first solo exhibition “study now steady” at Center for Arts, Research and Alliances (CARA) in New York, which includes the newly commissioned film “A Plot, A Scandal” (2023) departing from the stage work of the same name. A survey of her stage works was presented at HAU Hebbel am Ufer under the title “Complaint, A Lyric” in 2023. She is one of the participating artists in the Whitney Biennial 2024 “Even Better Than the Real Thing”.

Lewis is the recipient of the German Theatre Award Der FAUST in the category Best Performance in Dance (2023) for “A Plot / A Scandal”, the Tabori Award in the category of Distinction (2021), a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants Award (2018), a Bessie Award for Outstanding Production (2017) for “minor matter”, a Factory Artist residency at tanzhaus nrw (2017-19) and a Prix Jardin d’Europe (2014) from ImPulsTanz for “Sorrow Swag”.