Ligia Lewis is an artist, choreographer, dancer, and director working across stage, exhibition, and film. Her works are marked by physical and emotional intensity, where comedy and tragedy collide. Through her practice, performer and audience confront processes that disrupt normative conceptions of the body, as her work moves between the familiar and the unfamiliar.
Lewis negotiates the ghostly traces of history, memory, and the known and unknown. Sonic and visual metaphors meet the body, materializing the enigmatic, the poetic, and the dissonant. Her work continues to engage the nuances of embodiment. For Lewis, choreography is the movement of ideas across bodies—meticulously conceived, crafted, and directed—as a political act: a writing against the grain of the racial regime of representationalism and Black erasure.
“A theater is perhaps a kind of vise, a mechanism for durational holding. The best artists working in the form understand that whatever is placed between the proscenium’s jaws—sound, light, language, bodies, movement—is so clutched to facilitate the material’s irrevocable transformation, often via brute force. Ligia Lewis is one such artist.” — Catherine Damman, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Wesleyan University
Selected Works
She recently completed Wayward Chant, developed as part of her commission for Gropius Bau / Berliner Festspiele, accompanied by her largest solo exhibition to date, I’M NOT HERE FORRRRR…. Her most recent evening-length stage works include A Plot / A Scandal (2022), Still Not Still (2021), and deader than dead (2020). A Plot / A Scandal (2023), a film commissioned by the Center for Arts, Research, and Alliances (New York), departs from the stage work of the same name.
A survey of her stage works was presented at HAU Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin, DE) under the title Complaint, A Lyric in November 2023, featuring the trilogy Water Will (in Melody) (2018), minor matter (2016), and Sorrow Swag (2014). Lewis participated in the 2024 Whitney Biennial, Even Better Than the Real Thing. Further commissions include Sensation 1/This Interior (High Line Commission, 2019) and so something happened get over it; no nothing happened get with it (Jaou Tunis, 2018). In 2025, Lewis developed Some Thing Folk for Cullberg Ballet, which premiered at Tanz im August 2025.
Touring
She has presented her work across Europe, the United States, and internationally, including Festival d’Automne / Centre Pompidou, Paris; MOCA, Los Angeles; HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin; Tanzquartier, Vienna; MCA Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Spazio Griot / Mattatoio, Rome; Mudam, Luxembourg; Wien Modern, Vienna; Kaserne, Basel; REDCAT Theater, Los Angeles; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; beursschouwburg and Kaaitheater, Brussels; Arsenic, Lausanne; High Line Art and Performance Space, New York; OGR Torino; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Tate Modern, London; Cordova, Barcelona; and Human Resources, Los Angeles.
Her work has also been presented at festivals and biennials including Short Theater Festival (Prisma Artist), Rome; Ruhrtriennale, Bochum; Tanzplattform, Germany; Spring Festival, Utrecht; Festival Otoño, La Casa Encendida, Madrid; Politik im Freien Theater, Frankfurt; Liverpool Biennial; My Wild Flag, Stockholm; Jaou Tunis; Side Step Festival, Helsinki; Biennale of Moving Images, Geneva; American Realness, New York; Donaufestival, Krems; and Julidans, Amsterdam, among others.