Photo by Steven Dennett
Anya Liftig (born 1977, Norwalk, CT USA) is a writer and performance artist.
After a severe physical and neurological injury at the age of six, Liftig began dancing as physical therapy, eventually traveling to New York City in middle school to train with teachers from the New York City Ballet. At 15 she shifted to studying modern dance and became a scholarship student at the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance, commuting from Connecticut to New York after school to dance with the Teenage Ensemble. The daughter of public school teachers from disparate cultural backgrounds, her upbringing was often divided between her father’s suburban Connecticut and her mother’s native Eastern Kentucky. In addition to an active professional dance career, she was the president of the Westport Young Democrats, a summer intern on Capitol Hill for Senator Christopher J. Dodd, one of nine national scholarship winners of the Discover Card Tribute Award and wrote a regular column for her local newspaper.
At seventeen Liftig made a difficult decision and chose academics over continuing to pursue a professional dance career. She went to Yale, where she was an English major, and studied studio art with Tod Papageorge, Gregory Crewdson, Lois Conner, Justine Kurland and Rachel Berwick. She received numerous grants including the Adrian Van Sinderan Award for Book Collecting (‘97 and ‘99), the Richter Grant, the Sudler Grant for the Performing Arts and the St. Anthony Hall Education Fellowship. She was a Co-Founder of the Group for the Alliance of Life and Art, Co-Edited the Morse College Art and Architecture Journal Prototype, served as Photo Editor of The New Journal, was a member of St. Anthony Hall and the Elizabethan Club and appeared in eight theater productions.
After graduation, Liftig interned for food and culture writers Jane and Michael Stern. She helped run Opposition Field Research for the Hillary Clinton Senate campaign with the New York State Democratic Committee. She then left politics to pursue photography, publishing words and images in the New York Times Magazine, USA Today, Billboard, Now and Then and others.
She was a full-fellowship student in the photography program at Georgia State University where she earned her MFA in 2004. She studied with John McWilliams, Constance Thalken, Nancy Floyd, Craig Dongoski, Pam Longobardi and many others. While there, her work migrated from still photography to live performance art. Her work, self-evidence, was the first live performance thesis at GSU.
Since returning to the New York area in 2005, her performance work has been exhibited at TATE Modern, MOMA, Center for Performance Research, Panoply Performance Lab, Highways Performance Space, Lapsody4 Finland, Fado Toronto, Performance Art Institute San Francisco, Queens Museum, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Rose Art Museum at the University of Kentucky, Grace Exhibition Space, Movement Research at Judson Church, The Kitchen at the Independent Art Fair, Performer Stammtisch Berlin, Performance Space London, Month of Performance Art Berlin, OVADA-Oxford, Joyce Soho, and many other venues around the world. As a dancer and actress, Liftig has performed with Michael Freeman at Joyce Soho and at The Chocolate Factory and New York Live Arts in Andrea Kleine’s pieces Screening Room and My Dinner with Andrea.
She is a contributing editor to the Ugly Duckling Presse performance document series, Emergency INDEX, and has curated events at The Kitchen, Center for Performance Research and Queens Museum. In The Anxiety of Influence she dressed exactly like Marina Abramovic and sat across from her all day during The Artist is Present exhibition at MOMA. Liftig’s work has been published and written about in the New York Times, BOMB, Wall Street Journal, Vogue Italia, Public Culture, New York, PAJ, Critical Correspondence, Theater Magazine, Art Papers, Hyperallergic, and many others.
Since 2021 her experimental film and video work has been screened in festivals in the UK, Canada, Spain, France, Sweden, and the Netherlands.
Her non-fiction essays have been featured in Brain, Teen, BioStories, Hippocampus, Kindred and The Chattahoochee Review (Lamar York Prize Winner) as well as nominated for a Pushcart Prize and noted in Best American Non-Fiction. She is a 2021 Connecticut Council for the Arts Emerging Arts Fellow in Creative Writing, a recipient of a Franklin Furnace Award and a performance commission from the Mertz Gilmore Foundation. Liftig has received grant and residency support from MacDowell, Yaddo, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Hambidge Center for the Arts, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, Atlantic Center for the Arts, The New Museum, Bronx Museum of Art, Flux Projects Atlanta, University of Antioquia and Casa Tres Patios-Medellin, Colombia.
Her first book, Holler Rat, will be published by Abrams in August 2023.