10/06/2026
In memory of the voices we have lost, Susan Seizer, 1961-2026.
An experimental dancer turned anthropologist of dance, Susan Seizer moved to New York in the late 1970s to attend Barnard College, where she was a member of Le***an Activists at Barnard (LAB). She circulated in New York’s downtown le***an scene in the 1980s as a dancer, choreographer, and performer. She acted in multiple plays put together by the women’s theater collective More Fire! Productions, playing a Barnard student in Art Failures and the Devil, opposite her frequent collaborator, Jennifer Miller as God, in Whining + Dining. In a twice performed piece, Susan and Jennifer paid homage to Monique Wittig’s Les Guérillères by mud wrestling on a tarp on the floor of Franklin Furnace and in the basement of PS 122. “My attitude towards this piece is to really have fun with it,” she wrote in a letter, “enjoy the mud completely.” A super-8 film of their first mud wrestling performance was screened at the first MIX NYC in 1987.
Susan was inspired to apply to graduate programs in anthropology after seeing a dancer perform a traditional South Asian dance, Bharata Natyam, at Lincoln Center. “In the differences between this dance and my own familiar dance,” she wrote later, “I suddenly saw the extent to which culture shapes even our most intimate selves, our bodies, and the very ways we move.” As a doctoral student at the University of Chicago, she conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Tamil Nadu to learn about the lives of the people who perform Special Drama, often b***y all-night shows staged in towns and villages in South India. Her book, Stigmas of the Tamil Stage (, 2005), is based on this research. Throughout her career, she explored gender, sexuality, performance, and humor. She served as the chair of the Anthropology department at Indiana University until her retirement in 2021. We send our condolences to her wife, two sons, and her extended network of family and friends.
