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Elizabeth June Bergman (she/her) is a dancer, scholar, and educator based in Philadelphia. Her body of creative work includes improvisational performance, screendance/video dance, and scholarship on popular and commercial dance. Currently, Elizabeth is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance in the Theatre and Dance Department of Muhlenberg College. |
EDUCATION AND RESEARCH:
Elizabeth earned her Ph.D in Dance Studies in the Dance Department at Temple University in the fall of 2019. Her doctoral studies were supported by a University Fellowship and a Dissertation Completion Grant. She was awarded the Edrie Ferdun Emerging Scholar Award by Boyer College of Music and Dance in 2017 and was an Associate Graduate Fellow in the Center for the Humanities at Temple (CHAT) in 2018–2019. Elizabeth's dissertation examines practices of attribution and recognition, commercialism and commodity culture, and racial politics and racial ideology in the U.S. commercial dance industry through the case study of Michael Jackson and his choreographic collaborators from both street dance and studio dance backgrounds throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Her current research project expands her dissertation's thematic foci to include the case study of Madonna and her dancing collaborators during the same period.
Elizabeth also holds an MFA in Dance Performance from The University of Iowa (2009) and a BA in Dance from DeSales University (2004). She was certified as a 200-hour yoga teacher by James Miller in 2011 and received an additional 300-hours training from Rishikesh Yog Peeth in India in 2014.
TEACHING:
In higher education, Elizabeth's teaching foregrounds critical approaches to dance histories, popular dance studies, and somatic explorations of a diverse range of movement forms and disciplines. Prior to her current position as Visiting Assistant Professor at Muhlenberg College, Elizabeth taught at The University of Iowa, Temple University, Bryn Mawr College, and Point Park University. She has been an invited guest lecturer on topics including American social dance, dance in Hollywood films and music videos, the history of modern yoga, and popular dance research. Outside of higher ed, Elizabeth has over fifteen years of experience teaching ballet, modern/contemporary, and improvisational approaches to a range of professional, pre-professional, and recreational dancers; she taught hatha yoga at Heartland Yoga in Iowa City, Iowa between 2012 and 2015.
DANCEMAKING, PERFORMANCE, AND OTHER CREATIVE ENDEAVORS:
In addition to her solo work performed at various venues across the U.S, Elizabeth has choreographed dances in collaboration with The Collective (Baltimore), tbd. Dance Collective (Omaha), and student dancers at Creighton University (Omaha). Her screendances, created with filmmakers Alex de la Peña, Kaitlyn Busbee, and Louis P. Zieja, and composer Joshua Dumas, have been screened by Culcalorus Film Festival, Iowa Screendance Festival, Philadelphia Screendance Festival, and on Iowa Public Television. Elizabeth and her husband, Clark Baechle, create music/video/dance under the moniker Zlic: www.instagram.com/zlic.zlic/. Their musical side project, Pressureless, posts songs at https://pressureless.bandcamp.com/releases.
Elizabeth has performed in the work of many choreographers including Joanna Rosenthal-Reed, Rosy Simas, April Sellers, Amy Lynne Barr, Analia Alegre-Femenias, Lynn Bowman, Emily Gastineau, Nichol Mason-Lazenby, Christina Eltvedt, and Megan Flynn. During her graduate studies at The University of Iowa, she worked with Charlotte Adams, Eloy Barragan, Deanna Carter, George de la Peña, Armando Duarte, and Jennifer Kayle; at Temple University, she danced in works by Ishmael Houston-Jones and Lela Aisha Jones.
Elizabeth's experimental "A Generic Dance Essay," commissioned and edited by Emily Gastineau was published by MN Artists, a platform of the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota (https://mnartists.walkerart.org/a-generic-dance-essay.)
ORGANIZATIONAL AFFILIATIONS:
Elizabeth serves as the current Chair of PoP Moves Americas, one of the nodes of PoP Moves, an international research network focused on performances of the popular (popmoves.com/) as well as the acting Chair of the Dance Studies Association Working Group for Popular, Social, and Vernacular Dance (www.dancestudiesassociation.org/.)
