Lara Kramer

Lara Kramer is a Canadian dancer and artist.[1] Kramer lives and works on territory of the Kanien'kahá:ka Nation. She is Oji-Cree (Ojibwe and Cree). Kramer closely links her work to memory and examining issues of social, political and cultural importance for Canada and First Nations Peoples.

Her work Native Girl Syndrome (NGS) was well received and deals with her family's history and experiences of Canadian Indian Residential Schools.[2] NGS brings audiences into a space of feeling and remembering the impact of colonial violence on Indigenous young women.[3] In addition to NGS, she has created several feature length performance pieces such as This Time Will Be Different, Tame, Of Good Moral Character, Fragments, which explore family and personal, complex, multilayered experiences, including from the Pelican Lake Indian Residential School and street life. Kramer intended these experiences to speak to assimilation, cultural disorientation, confinement, survival, and human connection. Her works have been presented in Montreal, Ottawa, Peterborough, Toronto, Regina, Edmonton, Banff and Vancouver, gaining her recognition as an important Indigenous voice in Canada. She has been an artist-in-residence across Canada and in Australia, and faculty of the Indigenous Dance Residency at the Banff Centre.

In 2018, Lara Kramer was recipient of the Canada Council for the Arts Jacqueline Lemieux Prize for outstanding contributions in dance.