Dancer-choreographer Leslie Friedman has been praised by critics and audiences on four continents. Honors include the Dean Goodman Choice Award for Best Solo Performance and the Selma Jeanne Cohen Award for International Dance Scholarship--the first ever given.

   Leslie’s career includes a long list of “Firsts:” First American dancer to perform, choreograph and teach in China with sponsorship of the US State Dept. and the Chinese national ballet academies; First American artist to perform in public in Moscow and Leningrad with joint US/USSR sponsorship after a 14-year suspension of cultural exchanges; First American to perform and teach with official US and host government sponsorships in Spain, Hungary, Romania, Poland, Egypt, Sri Lanka and others.

   She performed extensively throughout India while there as a Fulbright Lecturer. In 1997, she was the only American to perform in the International Baltic Ballet Festival, along with the Royal Swedish, Royal  Danish, Bolshoi, and Maryinsky (Kirov) Ballets.

   She was awarded the Fulbright Senior Lectureship to create a new theater/dance work for the National Academy of Theater & Film, Sofia, Bulgaria.

   Leslie Friedman’s choreography has been set on companies in China, Romania, Poland, England as well as in the US.

   She has performed under the direction of Jennifer Muller, Kathy Posin, Cliff Keuter, Shela Xoregos in their own work.

   Leslie’s serious dance training began at age eight, directed by Madame Victoria Cassan, an Englishwoman who had been a soloist in Anna Pavlova’s legendary touring company. As an adult, Leslie studied at the Alvin Ailey School in New York, where she was offered a scholarship, at the Martha Graham School, which invited her to its professional training class, and with Margaret Jenkins and Gus Solomons, Jr. (Cunningham technique).  

   Her service to the field of dance includes National Endowment for the Arts site visitor; Isadora Duncan awards panelist; Theatre Bay Area CA$H grant panelist. She was President of the Board of Directors of Dance Bay Area, the largest service organization for dance, Northern California.

   Leslie has taught modern dance, improvisation & composition, and contemporary ballet: Reed College; Washington University in St. Louis; University of Michigan; Ballet Rambert, London; Conservatory of Dance, Tunis; Royal Conservatory, Madrid; and many other national academies and schools around the world. Please contact The Lively Foundation for more details.

   In an earlier life, Leslie earned a Ph.D., in British History, at Stanford and taught there and at Vassar, her alma mater, and Case Western Reserve University before leaving academia to return to dance.

   Leslie Friedman’s writing on the arts appears in The Hedgehog as well as in newspapers and journals in the US and abroad.