Dance and Body Arts Studio in Ledyard, CT
Gina Bonati was born to her brilliant, beatnik parents in New Orleans, lived many places and finished high school at Mission High in San Francisco. In 1981 she moved to New York City to attend The Juilliard School. While at Juilliard, she studied with Hanya Holm, Anna Sokolow, Hector Zaraspe, Ethel Winter, Kazuko Hirabayashi, Daniel Lewis, Wendy Hilton, Doris Rudko and Alfredo Corvino and was allowed by special permission of Harold Stone to be part of the drama department where she studied with John Stix and Timothy Monich. She studied music with Robert Dennis and Theater History with the philosopher, Maurice Vallency.
Independently, she studied acting with Sharon Chatten for 6 years, then with Geraldine Baron. In 2003, after 4 years and 7 auditions, she became a member of the Actors Studio.
She has been creating her own work since 1982 in dance, theater, music, language and installation. Titles include Emergence Sea, Noisedance/I Think He’s Hurting Me Now, Hunger & Visits (H&V received critical acclaim from Jennifer Dunning of The New York Times), The Miraculous Development of a Child, Bird #1 through 8. Collaborators include Kenneth King, Elizabeth Castagna, Gray dePol, Soph Klein, Ellen Harvey, Elizabeth Schmuhl. Works have been presented in New York at The Kitchen, Dancespace at St Marks Church, DIA Foundation for the Arts and have traveled to Mexico, Denmark, Sweden and Italy. A modest collection of her work is in The Lincoln Center Library for The Performing Arts.
She holds a BFA in Dance from The Juilliard School, an MFA in Dance from Mills College and in May of 2018, will hold an MFA in Music from The Mills Music Department and Center for Contemporary Music. In July of 2018, she will be in residence at CIMM Centro Investigation del Movimento y la Musica in Santiago, Chile where she will be teaching and performing.
Elizabeth studied under one of the original members of the Paul Taylor Dance Company who also trained with Martha Graham and taught Graham technique to her: Eileen Cropley. She studied dance at the University of Michigan, danced professionally in the Chicago company Khecari, and has been fortunate to learn from artists such as Bobbi Jene Smith, Lauri Stallings, Yin Yue, Ohad Naharin, Saar Harari, Lee Sher,Peter Sparling, and many others.
She has attended dance intensives with companies such as Paul Taylor Dance Company, Batsheva Dance Company with Ohad Naharin, gloATL’s Process and Living Lab, and worked with Gallim Dance in NYC as an Education and Outreach Coordinator and as a Grant Writer. Most recently, she took part in Lauri Stalling’s the room for tender choreographies with gloATL at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Atlanta.
She makes collaborative movement/video poems and as has worked with artists such as Gina Bonati, Mary-Kim Arnold, Celia Rowlson-Hall, Mia Lidofsky, Carrie Olivia Adams, and Joseph Clayton Mills.
She frequently writes about dance, movement, and performance for Michigan Quarterly Review, and currently works at the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.
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