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2007 Hellman Fellow

Lisa Wymore

Building tools to enable interdisciplinary creative collaboration (UCB)

Lisa Wymore is a Professor at UC Berkeley teaching classes in choreography, dance technique, improvisation, and performance. She also is the Co-Artistic Director of Smith/Wymore Disappearing Acts — an award winning dance and theater company creating multimedia and experimental performances for national and international audiences.

During her 2007 Hellman Fellowship, she built Z-Lab, a technology-driven dance lab that allowed for interactive real-time collaboration among dancers in different locations (before the proliferation of Zoom and video conferencing). She collaborated with Professor Ruzena Bajcsy from Berkeley’s Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department, creating live projects that involved sending large format video files that were blended together into a virtual meeting place where performers could meet and dance together. The Z-Lab team was awarded a National Science Foundation Grant for their work together, and Professor Wymore used the Z-Lab to create numerous other international dance collaborations.

My Hellman Fellowship was immensely beneficial in supporting my career at Berkeley. It provided resources for the technical equipment I needed to get my lab up and running, and the incentive to make interdisciplinary campus connections which are now the hallmark of my creative work.

– Lisa Wymore

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