Lieber and Smith, Inc.

Lieber and Smith, Inc, a feminist not-for-profit, supports progressive art and sustainability for artists in NYC, directly serving marginalized families through lactation work, reproductive justice, and somatic improvisation workshops while also sustaining and supporting the choreographic work of Molly Lieber and Eleanor Smith. A non-hierarchical organization built through a seventeen-year choreographic partnership, we use dance to counter heteropatriarchal objectification of women. In late 2020, both in spite of and because of the pandemic, we decided to become an artist-run 501c3. As we, the founding members, are sexual assault survivors, the organization provides structures of support and empowerment for artist families as well as survivors of sexual trauma, through feminist art, support groups, and improvisation workshops. We provide reproductive justice and birth advocacy classes, lactation care for low-income families and caregivers, and one-on-one counseling sessions. Our work fights for reproductive justice and birth advocacy, targeting misrepresentation of marginalized bodies through our practice of deconstructing these injustices and reenacting their true version through the potentiality of movement, where labor is exalted as effortful expression. Coming from a collaborative working model based in support and care, we aim to make dance artistry a sustainable career in New York City.

Molly Lieber and Eleanor Smith, as an organization, work to recognize and acknowledge the overwhelming systems of white supremacist, classist, and patriarchal structures that exist in our macro and micro cultures of dance making. We do not know all of our shortcomings. Within our recognition and acknowledgment of these systems, we work towards changing them as best we can, as white identified bodies, in hopes of a revolution. Our view of justice is not a moment or decision, but rather an ongoing emergence of diversity, equity, and inclusion. 

 Our body of work has emerged and developed from a desire to create collaboratively and from a desire to actively dismantle patriarchy — which comports with a feminist model of art-making. Our moniker - Molly Lieber and Eleanor Smith - sets our names next to one another to point to this equal collaborative partnership of dance making. This is also a representation of how we situate ourselves within a lineage of feminist artists that have used their own bodies as source and text.

For lactation support:

www.mollyslactationcounseling.com

Molly: 917-589-2211

Board of Directors:

Thomas Ford, MFA

Ani Javian, MFA

Justin Ternullo

Kelly Washburn, RNP

Katie Workum