Elizabeth Bemis Kendall (born April 7, 1947) is an American academic, television writer, and journalist. After working as a writer for the PBS show Great Performances and an editor for Ballet Review, she published several books – particularly Where She Danced (1979), The Runaway Bride: Hollywood Romantic Comedy of the 1930s (1992), and Balanchine and the Lost Muse (2013) – mostly focusing on dance history. She is Associate Professor of Liberal Studies and Literary Studies at The New School.[1]
Elizabeth Bemis Kendall was born on April 7, 1947 in St. Louis, Missouri.[2] Her parents were Betty (née Conant) and falconer Henry Cochran Kendall.[3] On April 3, 1969, she and her mother were injured when the station wagon she was driving crashed into an abutment on U.S. Route 61; her mother died from her injuries afterwards.[4]
In 1981, Kendall was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship "for a study of Hollywood lyric comedy in the 1930's",[2] and she later published The Runaway Bride: Hollywood Romantic Comedy of the 1930s in 1992.[1] In 2000, she published her memoir American Daughter.[3] In 2008, she published Autobiography of a Wardrobe, a memoir of herself from the perspective of her own attire.[5] In 2013, she published Balanchine and the Lost Muse, a book on the relationship between ballet choreographer George Balanchine and ballet dancer Lidia Ivanova.[6]
She was also a National Arts Journalism Program Senior Fellow (2002-2003), a New York Public Library Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers Fellow (2004-2005), a Likhachev Foundation Fellow (2009), and a Leon Levy Center for Biography Fellow (2011-2012).[1]
As an academic, she specializes in non-fiction, Russian culture in the early-20th century, and history of clothing and textiles.[1] At New School, she has taught classes on non-fiction, general literature, and cultural history.[1]