About the Institute Faculty

Dance Exchange Institutes are led by company members Peter DiMuro, Thomas Dwyer, Elizabeth Johnson, Liz Lerman, Matt Mahaney, Cassie Meador, Shula Strassfeld, Martha Wittman and, when indicated, special guest artists.  Please click on a company member's name to learn more.

PETER DiMURO (Producing Artistic Director) has performed with, taught, and choreographed for professional artists and those new to art-making for twenty-five years. The autobiographical Light Reading/Male Monuments, and the repertoire of his Boston-based company, Peter DiMuro Performance Associates, have been seen in the U.S. and Europe.  Peter was named a 1995 Mayor of Boston/ProArts Public Service in the Arts Award recipient, a White House Millennial Artist in 2000, and has received grants from the National Performance Network, Artists’ Foundation and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. With the Dance Exchange since 1993, Peter directed several of the company’s Hallelujah tour sites and the nationally seen LGBT inspired work Near/Far/In/Out. His family-defining Funny Uncles was recently presented by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and Baltimore’s Creative Alliance.

THOMAS DWYER began a dance career with Liz Lerman after retiring from U.S. government service in June 1988. His choreography, known for employing community-based seniors, has been presented at Dance Place, the Church Street Theatre in Washington, D.C., and the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at the University of Maryland.

ELIZABETH JOHNSON (Associate Artistic Director) is the Director of the Dance Exchange’s Teen Exchange program and the National Teen Institutes for young artists. Working with Celeste Miller in collaboration with Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival she has “Set Curriculum in Motion,” teaching high school science and math through kinesthetic learning methods. She is a recipient of a D.C. Arts and Humanities Young Artists grant, and was honored as a Center for Creative Youth Arts Leadership awardee by the Capital Region Education Council. Elizabeth’s choreography was showcased in Meditations on Mothers and Others at the 2006 Capital Fringe Festival.

LIZ LERMAN (Founding Artistic Director) is a choreographer, performer, writer, educator, and speaker. She founded Liz Lerman Dance Exchange in 1976 and has cultivated the company’s unique multi-generational ensemble, with dancers whose ages currently range from 25 to 72, into a leading force in contemporary dance. Liz has been the recipient of numerous honors, including the American Choreographer Award, the American Jewish Congress “Golda” Award, an honorary doctorate from Williams College, and Washingtonian Magazine’s 1988 Washingtonian of the Year. In 2002 her work was recognized with a MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellowship, and she was recently honored at the Jewish Cultural Achievement Awards and inducted into the University of Maryland’s Alumni Hall of Fame. Liz’s work has been commissioned by Lincoln Center, American Dance Festival, BalletMet, and the Kennedy Center, among many others. From 1994 to 1996, in collaboration with the Music Hall of Portsmouth, N.H., Liz directed the Shipyard Project, which has been widely noted as an example of the power of art to enhance such values as social capital and civic dialogue. From 1999 to 2002 she led Hallelujah, which engaged people in 15 cities throughout the United States in the creation of a series of dances “in praise of” topics vital to their communities. Her current projects include Ferocious Beauty: Genome  and Radical Prayer.  She is the author of Teaching Dance to Senior Adults (1983) and the co-author of Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process (2003), and has written articles and essays for such publications as Reconstructionism Today, Faith and Form, Movement Research, the Washington Post Book World, and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Community, Culture, and Globalization. Born in Los Angeles and raised in Milwaukee, Liz attended Bennington College and Brandeis University, received her B.A. in dance from the University of Maryland, and an M.A. in dance from George Washington University. She is married to storyteller Jon Spelman. Their daughter, Anna, is in her first year of college.

MATT MAHANEY graduated from the North Carolina School of the Arts and has performed works by Brenda Daniels, Sean Sullivan, Trish Casey, Diane Markham, Scott Rink and Alberto (Tito) Delsaz and his mentor, David Beadle. Matt also produces his own work, which includes but is not limited to digital video, music, choreography, and sculpture.

CASSIE MEADOR, a Georgia native, is a choreographer, performer and teacher.  She joined the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange as a company member in 2004.  As an educator she has taught at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Columbia College Chicago, American University, and as an assistant to Peter DiMuro at the American Dance Festival.  Cassie received her BFA in Dance from The Ohio State University, where she was the recipient of an honor’s research grant in support of her choreographic and performance work in alcohol and drug recovery homes throughout the southeast.  She was a scholarship student at the Jose Limon Company, American College Dance Festival and the Bates Dance Festival. Her work has been presented nationally as well as locally in Washington at the Capital Fringe Festival and Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center.  In August, Cassie led a team of Dance Exchange company members as choreographer for the Open Circle Theatre’s Production of Evita. 

SHULA STRASSFELD has an MA in Dance Education from Columbia University. While living in Israel, she taught at the Bat Dor Studios and The Rubin Academy of Hebrew University and was a soloist with the Mirali Sharon Dance Company, performing throughout Israel, Europe and the US.  She has also danced with South Street Dance Company and Sybil Dance Company in Philadelphia, and with choreographers Jan Van Dyke and Sandra Neels in North Carolina.  Shula's work has been presented in the Toronto Fringe Dance festival and by Ballet Creole and Dancemakers, and she is the author of The Choreography of Prayer in the Second Jewish Catalog.

MARTHA WITTMAN has been teaching, dancing and choreographing for more than 50 years.  As a young performer she danced with the Juilliard Dance Theatre under the direction of Doris Humphrey and in the companies of Ruth Currier, Joseph Gifford and Anna Sokolow. For many years she was an associate choreographer with the Dances We Dance Company directed by Betty Jones and Fritz Ludin.  Her awards include three National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, the Doris Humphrey Fellowship from the American Dance Festival, Individual Artist Awards from the Maryland Council on the Arts, and two awards from Dance/USA’s National College Choreography Initiative.  She was a long-term member of the Bennington College dance faculty in Vermont, and has been a guest artist, teacher and choreographer in numerous colleges, universities and summer dance programs around the country.  Martha joined the Dance Exchange in 1996 and has been happily working with them every since.