Photos by Olivia Moon
Photos by Olivia MoonDance Lab Resident 2025–2026
Eliza Malecki is a queer choreographer, dancer, producer, creative leader, thrifter, and maker of odd things. With a degree in dance from Goucher College, she brings over eight years of professional experience creating and presenting original choreographic work in the Boston area. Her artistic voice is characterized by an inventive and quirky movement aesthetic, multidisciplinary collaborations, joy based practices, and a unique sense of humor that threads through everything she creates.
Drawing from contemporary dance, dance theater, comedy, and social dance forms, Eliza’s creative process is centered around radical self-expression, identity exploration, and building a sense of safety and joy within rehearsal processes that audiences can tangibly feel. She is inspired by the messiness of life and the diversity of lived experiences that humans hold within themselves, and loves to explore how different realities can intersect through storytelling and movement.
Over the past two years, Eliza has been developing a body of choreographic work centered around the role of clothing in identity formation and self-perception. Alongside her collaborator, stylist Mary O’Keefe, the two have built two iterative dance fashion shows that continuously dig deeper into the power of clothing to shape truths about ourselves, to keep us in boxes, to help us see ourselves differently, to help us blend in, or to manifest who we are striving to become.
Eliza’s choreography has been supported by the Somerville Cultural Council, Newton Cultural Council, Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture, the Transformative Development Initiative, the Maine Arts Commission, and the New England Foundation for the Arts. She has completed residencies at Bearnstow (ME), The Iron Factory (PA), the City of Lawrence (MA), and the Studios at MASS MoCA (MA). An accomplished producer, Eliza has organized a wide range of events—from galleries and dance performances to fashion shows and music festivals—with audiences ranging from 25 to over 10,000. She has also contributed as a dramaturg for works by Aliza Franz, Laila Franklin and Mary Teuscher.
2025–2026
Dance Lab
Project Statement
MY SHIRTS ALL SHRUNK
The LGBTQIA+ community have long been at the forefront of trendsetting in fashion, but historically and now continue to be the subject of hate for their refusal to conform. Eliza’s project is a dance theater piece reflecting the journey of growing into a queer identity through the lens of fashion.
The title speaks to the experience of squeezing into a shirt, an identity, or a container that was never designed for you. As we grow into ourselves, the spaces meant to contain us become too small, revealing a need for something larger, something that allows us to fully inhabit the space we deserve. This piece will offer an expansive world where queer identity is explored through the evolution of personal style.
Clothing carries immense power in shaping our sense of self, and there’s a particular spark that ignites when an outfit perfectly captures who you are inside. The stage will be set up to resemble the inside of a dream closet, referencing both the metaphor of “coming out of the closet” and the physical space where clothing lives and identity is curated, questioned, and sometimes hidden. This piece reclaims the closet, not as a place to be hidden, but as a place of wonder to experiment and try on different selves until you find the one that really fits. While our government actively acts to silence and erase the LGBTQIA+ community, the world of “my shirts all shrunk” will depict a fantasyland of infinite possibility, a safe space to process, and a playground for experimentation.