Born in South Korea and raised in Wisconsin, Elisabeth Roskopf 이지영 is a dancer, performer, choreographer, educator, pianist, and a mother to her daughter, Alina. She is a company member of Li Chiao-Ping Dance, Danceworks Performance MKE, Wild Space Dance Company, and the Gina Laurenzi Dance Project. Elisabeth received her Bachelor of Arts in Piano and a minor in Dance from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. She is currently earning her Master of Fine Arts in Dance at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) where she is honored to be a recipient of the Graduate Student Excellence Fellowship award. Elisabeth’s Dance MFA Thesis concert, | Out of Place |,became a platform for her to create the first Transracial Asian American Adoptee Dance Project in the city of Milwaukee. At UWM, she began her career in academia as a lecturer in the Department of Dance and became a graduate teaching assistant while she is also performing and studying under the distinguished professors and guest artists such as Daniel Burkholder, Maria Gillespie, Mair Culbreth, Dan Schuchart, Dawn Springer, Deb Loewen, Mauriah Donegan Kraker, Vershawn Sanders-Ward, Jan Erkert, Alexandra Beller, Kevin Williamson, Teresa VanDenend Sorge, and Sooyeon Lee. Elisabeth is the Founder and Creative Director of Dance For Diversity, a screendance project that is made explicitly for Artists of Color to share their voices and stories of identity through their dance-making and performance work.
Elisabeth’s research encompasses autoethnography in movement through storytelling that creates a path for her embodied subjectivity. She links her corporeal experiences through cultural studies, post-colonial studies, and embodied cultural memory. As a Korean American Dance Artist, Elisabeth’s choreographic work and embodied dance scholarship create a platform for Adoptees and BIPOC Dance Artists to have a place to be visible in the fullness of their identity and authenticity while fostering a sense of belonging through embodied storytelling.
Elisabeth co-produced and performed in “Provenance: A Letter to My Daughter”, an award-winning screendance work created with director/choreographer Li Chiao-Ping and cinematographer/editor Christal Wagner. This dance film has been selected to be screened in various film festivals nationally and internationally, such as the 2024 Incheon International Short Film Festival (Finalist for Best Short Film), 2024 Busan New Wave Short Film Festival (Best Editing Award), 2023 Experimental, Dance & Music Film Festival (Best Direction Award), 2023 Milwaukee Film Festival, to name a few.
As a second installment to Provenance, Elisabeth had the vision to create the new dance film, 결코 잃지 않았다 (Never Lost), with director/choreographer/producer Li Chiao-Ping and cinematographer/editor Christal Wagner along with performance, unscripted narration, and additional choreography by Elisabeth. This dance film has been selected and received the Honorable Mention in Direction award for the 10,000 Dreams Film Festival. The film has also been selected to be screened in the 2025 ARTSinTANK Dance Festival in Korea, WRPN Women’s International Film Festival, and the Omma Poom Park Grand Opening in Paju, Korea.
Elisabeth Roskopf 이지영 