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Ellyzabeth AdlerEllyzabeth Adler is a MacArthur Award–winning artist and the executive artistic director and founder of Chicago Danztheatre Ensemble (CDE), the company she boldly launched in 2001 at just 26 years old. For 25 years, she has stretched the edges of performance, shaping a distinctive danztheatre language that braids together movement, text, image, and sound. Her body of work includes 12 full-length productions and countless shorter pieces, among them T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, the company’s inaugural work, as well as The Yellow Wallpaper, Touch, Mirrors, Hope, and Ethereal Abandonment, created in collaboration with longtime friend Lucy Vurusic Riner of RE|Dance.
Adler’s practice lives at the intersection of art-making and community-building. Through festivals and curated performance platforms such as the Full Circle Festival, Body Passages Artist Residency, and Art Heals, she cultivates spaces where artists can risk, experiment, and be seen. With a deep commitment to social justice, her works—including Unraveling Bill and projects created with and for veterans—have traveled beyond traditional stages into social service and community spaces, inviting dialogue, reflection, and healing. Her creative life also unfolds in classrooms and school hallways. For 24 years, Adler has designed curriculum, trained educators, and taught in Chicago Danztheatre Ensemble’s arts education programs. Under her leadership, she and CDE’s teaching artists have reached more than 9,000 CPS students; some now return as educators themselves, continuing the cycle of artistry and mentorship. A survivor and advocate, Adler speaks publicly about domestic abuse and uses story, performance, and language as tools for awareness and change. She is a published author of poetry and prose, exploring themes of resilience, embodiment, and care. In 2020, she began a new chapter as a single mother by choice to her daughter, Miriam Sky. By openly sharing her IVF journey and her path to motherhood, Adler works to soften silence and dismantle stigma around fertility, family-making, and what it means to choose one’s own way forward. |
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