Biography
Eliza Ladd’s Biography
Eliza Ladd is a performer, composer, writer, director, and teacher from New York City. She holds an MFA in Theater: Contemporary Performance from Naropa University and a BA in Comparative Religion from Harvard University. Growing up in the downtown NYC dance and performance world, Eliza trained as a sculptor, percussionist, actor, movement artist, and rock singer. She has created and performed original multi-disciplinary work in NYC at PS 122, Dixon Place, Dia Downtown, Movement Research, the Knitting Factory, and the T. Schreiber Studio. She has acted at La Mama, New York Theater Workshop, The Connelly, and with Shakespeare and Company in Lenox, MA. Eliza received a 1998 Franklin Furnace Emerging Artist Award for her original performance work and the Audience Encore Award at the 2007 Boulder International Fringe Festival for her play, Elephants and Gold.
Eliza is certified in Body Dynamics™, a teacher of Movement for the Actor at Shakespeare & Company and, a director of ensemble theater making. She is the creator of Live Sound Action, a form in which theater arises out of image, sound, and direct play between performer and object. Eliza has developed Live Sound Action in solo and ensemble performances and as a teaching medium. It is featured in collaboration projects with Randolph Curtis Rand (This Thing of Darkness), Kathryn Blume (The Accidental Activist), Annie Lanzillotto (My Throwing Arm), and in the world premiere of Israel Horovitz’s Captains and Courage. Most recently Eliza is in collaboration with Tectonic Theater Project and Leigh Fondakowski on her new play about Charlotte Cushman.
Eliza has taught creative process, theater arts, and designed integrated curriculum with and for special needs kindergartners, gifted high school students, and public school teachers throughout the NYC public school system. She has designed and taught theater and professional development workshops and residencies at Naropa University, California State University Summer Arts Intensive, Bank Street College, and Cooper Union College of Science and Art. As movement faculty at Shakespeare & Company, Eliza has coached aspiring and professional actors in the art of freeing their bodies and voices.
Currently, in addition to offering her own workshops, Eliza teaches Acting at Marymount Manhattan College, The Function of Theater at Kingsborough Community, and Ensemble Body Practice at the T. Schreiber Acting Conservatory. In addition to teaching theater Eliza facilitates Professional Development for teachers, engineers and other corporate professionals at Think Build Live Success, Best Effect, Bank Street College, The Cooper Union and through Young Audiences NY.
Following a great run at the Berkshire Fringe Festival, Eliza’s contemporary musical, Elephants and Gold, is in further development for a NYC premier at La Mama in 2012. Eliza is continuing to develop on est deshabille, a solo comedy about death (recently supported by an Emerging Artist Residency at the Field) as well as exploring her other solo characters Candelabra and Chicken Man, and continuing to write and perform her music. Also, stay tuned for conjoined, a new performance work in process this summer. Eliza is thankful to have received a 2010 Puffin Foundation grant in support of her Live Sound Action pedagogy and to be going to Earthdance in February as part of the E|Merge Residency.
