Lizzy Davis

Lizzy Cooper Davis is an artist and scholar interested in how the arts can facilitate community conversation, resistance, and change. She is particularly focused on cultural work within Black freedom movements and has conducted research in such places as Cuba, Brazil, and New Orleans. She is currently developing an applied theatre project with formerly incarcerated people in partnership with Ritual4Return, Emerson Prison Initiative, and New Beginnings Reentry Services.

Cooper Davis’ research on Black cultural organizing in the U.S. from the civil rights-era to the present was supported by a Ford Fellowship and hosted by Harvard’s Music Department and one of her resulting publications, “All Rights Reserved: Behind the Strategic Copyright of ‘We Shall Overcome’,” was named the Best Essay in Popular Music Scholarship by the Popular Music Study Group of the American Musicological Society. Other recent work includes a leadership role with the Embodying Antiracism Initiative at Wesleyan University and two projects at Jacob’s Pillow Dance–the first as a core collaborator for “Pittsfield Moves,” a year-long community engagement project led by Angela’s Pulse with artists and activists in Berkshire County, and the second as part of the Dance and Social Change Working Group led by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and Liz Lerman. She also works with Urban Bush Women on their antiracist leadership development and cultural organizing initiatives and as a scholar-in-residence.

Cooper Davis has trained with Augusto and Julian Boal and used the methods of their Theatre of the Oppressed in schools, community centers, and prisons. Her roles at the intersection of arts and social impact have included: Facilitation Trainer for Anna Deavere Smith’sNotes From the Field: Doing Time in Education, at the American Repertory Theater; facilitator for the community engagement initiative for Claudia Rankine’s play, The White Card,co-produced by the A.R.T. and ArtsEmerson; Humanities Scholar and engagement partner for The Peculiar Patriot at ArtsEmerson; and mentor for Live Arts Boston, a project of the Boston Foundation supporting Boston-area performing artists, presenters, and producers.

Cooper Davis has performed nationally as an actor in such theaters as Second Stage, The Public Theater, The Long Wharf, Berkeley Rep, and The American Repertory Theater and with such directors as Liesl Tommy, Anne Bogart, and Mary Zimmerman. She has also worked in television, film, and radio. She co-editedEnacting Pleasure: Artists and Scholars Respond to Carol Gilligan’s Map of Love(2010) and contributed a chapter on the Free Southern Theater’s Story Circle methodology to Creating Space for Democracy: A Primer on Dialogue and Deliberation in Higher Education(Stylus, 2019). Her work on the freedom songs of the civil rights movement appeared in the roots music journalNo Depression and the Journal of the Society for American Music, and her writing on the Urban Bush Women is in Creating Socially Engaged Art: Can Dance Change the World(Fall, 2021). She is also a co-editor and contributor to a forthcoming volume on the Embodying Antiracism Initiative at Wesleyan University.

Cooper Davis is a member of the Advisory Council for the Emerson Prison Initiative and the HowlRound Theatre Commons and is also on the National Advisory Boards for Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life and the American Alliance for Theatre and Education.