Elizabeth June Bergman (she/her) is a dancer, scholar, and educator currently based in Philadelphia. Her work takes the form of solo performance, dance scholarship, dance films, and collaboration with other creatives.
EDUCATION AND RESEARCH:
Bergman earned her Ph.D in Dance Studies in the Dance Department at Temple University in the fall of 2019.
Her doctoral studies were fully 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. Bergman's dissertation examines practices of attribution and recognition, commercialism and commodity culture, and racial politics and racial ideology in the Los Angeles 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.
Bergman 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:
Bergman has over a decade of experience teaching ballet, modern/contemporary, and improvisational forms to a range of professional, collegiate, and pre-professional and recreational dancers across the continental U.S. She taught hatha yoga at Heartland Yoga in Iowa City, Iowa between 2012 and 2015. Bergman has taught a variety of undergraduate dance theory/history courses at The University of Iowa, Temple University, and Bryn Mawr College and has been an invited guest lecturer on topics including American social dance, Hollywood film and music videos, and the history of modern yoga. She is currently an adjunct instructor at Temple University.
DANCEMAKING AND PERFORMANCE:
In addition to her solo work performed at various venues across the U.S, Bergman has choreographed dances in collaboration with The Collective (Baltimore), tbd. Dance Collective (Omaha), and student dancers at Creighton University (Omaha). Several of her screendances, created in collaboration with filmmakers such as Alex de la Peña, Kaitlyn Busbee, and Louis P. Zieja, and composer Joshua Dumas, have screened as part of dance film festivals and on Iowa Public Television. Bergman and her husband, Clark Baechle, create music/video/dance under the moniker Zlic.
As a dancer, Bergman has performed in the work of many choreographers including Jennifer Kayle, Charlotte Adams, Armando Duarte, Eloy Barragan, Deanna Carter, Joanna Rosenthal-Reed, Rosy Simas, April Sellers, Amy Lynne Barr, Analia Alegre-Femenias, Lynn Bowman, Emily Gastineau, Nichol Mason-Lazenby, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Lela Aisha Jones, and Christina Eltvedt. She began working with Megan Flynn Dance Company in spring 2020.
ORGANIZATIONAL AFFILIATIONS:
Bergman 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. https://popmoves.com/. She is also an active member of Dance Studies Association and Popular Culture Association.