Lisa Bufano, (b. 1972) is a disabled American interdisciplinary performance artist whose work incorporates elements of doll-making, animation, and dance.[1]
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Born in 1972 in Bridgeport, Connecticut, Bufano is a graduate of both Tufts University[2] and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (SMFA).[3] A competitive gymnast as a child (and a go-go dancer in college),[4] she became a bilateral below-the-knee and total finger amputee due to a life-threatening staphylococcus bacterial infection at the age of 21.
After losing her fingers and lower legs, Bufano began her performance and dancing career when a professor at the University of Linz doing research on the lives of amputees discovered her web page and offered her a stipend to perform in Vienna.[5] She has toured (from 2006 to 2010) with the AXIS Dance Company, performing works variously choreographed by Victoria Marks, Joe Goode, and Kate Weare to audiences in Austria, Croatia, Slovenia, and Canada, and has performed to a packed house at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts[6] as well as at the Mikhail Baryshnikov Arts Center and Judson Memorial Church in NYC, among other venues. [7]
Her dance work typically incorporates a variety of prosthetics and props[8] (such as using orange Queen Anne table legs as legs and arms), [9] but she also includes segments where her unadorned body is the focus of the performance. According to Bufano she manipulates her body as a way to explore alternative locomotion, corporeal difference, and animation/manipulation.
Bufano lists amongst her influences medical drawings, historical wax models and dolls, and optical toys; flip dolls and paper dolls; the structural aspects of Japanese jointed dolls, Hans Bellmer's doll work, Louise Bourgeois' cell installations, and the animation of Jan Švankmajer and the Quay Brothers.[10]
She explained her aesthetic and political goals when she claimed that:
Despite my own terror and discomfort in being watched (or, maybe, because of it), I am finding that being in front of viewers as a performer with deformity can produce a magnetic tension that could be developed into strength. I attempt to channel this tension by exaggerating the mode of physical difference (for example, presenting myself on stilts)."[11]
Originally based in Boston, Massachusetts, she currently has an artist residency[12] in Boise, Idaho.[13] She is also a Franklin Furnace Fund recipient.[14]