About

Eliza Ladd Schwarz is a performer, director, stage writer, song maker, and movement designer from NYC. She is thrilled to be in her second year on the faculty at CWRU / Cleveland Playhouse MFA after 10 years teaching at the FSU / Asolo Conservatory. Eliza has created original multi-disciplinary work in NYC at PS 122, Dixon Place,  Movement Research, the Knitting Factory, and Joyce Soho, and performed at La Mama, the Kitchen, NY Theater Workshop, and St. Ann’s Warehouse, as well as with  Shakespeare and Company in MA.

She won the Audience Encore Award for her ensemble musical Elephants and Gold, produced at the Boulder Fringe and the Berkshire Fringe, and wrote and performed On Est Déshabillé, a comedy about death at the United Solo Theatre Festival in NYC and The Berkshire Fringe. Eliza is the recipient of a Franklin Furnace Emerging Artist Award for her original performance work, a Puffin Foundation Grant in support of her Live Sound Action theater training, and an Andrew W Mellon Foundation Grant for “Devised Theater and Collaboration for Social Engagement.”

In Florida Eliza created and performed Selfie of the Ancients and Tigers Above and Tigers Below at New Music New College, O Let Me Just Be the Greek Whore that I Am at the Sarasolo Festival, Dali +Picasso at the Dali Museum, and the solo works Autobiography of the Human Species and Gravity and Levity at Sarasota Contemporary Dance. Notable recent works include Work /Play /Work, a theatrical ensemble zoom  response to the 2020 call for social justice, and Agridulce/Bittersweet (2023), a bilingual community collaboration.

Currently, through the Glennan Fellowship at CWRU,  Eliza is developing a new course, Live Sound Action: Learning at the Crossroads of Performance and Design. Also, she is initiating a new devised piece titled COBALT – a  digging into the world surrounding the precious natural resource.

Last year in the MFA she contributed Original Ensemble Choreography to Middletown and collaborated as  Movement Coach on the Tempest. This year she will be directing Men On Boats, teaching Movement and Devising Original Theater at the undergraduate level, and teaching  MFA Movement as well as collaborating on the season.