About Me

Lily Margaret Selthofner (she/they) is an interdisciplinary artist working with dance, film, writing, and painting. Currently, she is pursuing an M.F.A. in Dance – Screendance at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Lily holds a B.A. in Dance and Anthropology from Columbia University, which included study abroad in Venice and Paris, as well as an artistic residency at Barnard College’s Movement Lab. Lily served as Assistant Director of Open Dance Ensemble in NYC 2023-2024, and returned to choreograph a piece with the company in 2026, titled Harbor. Lily is also a member of Art MidWisconsin, a collective of visual artists.

Lily’s work is grounded in somatic political ecology: in particular, exploring relationships between nature, embodiment, and storytelling. Driven by the healing powers of creativity, her work parses through existential themes with tender emotionality and symbolic narratives. Ethnographic methods, as well as site-specificity, often shape Lily’s creative processes.

As a researcher, Lily was a Spring 2025 Fellow with Borshch of Art, writing a monograph titled “Poetics of Displacement: Maya Deren Through a Ukrainian Lens,” which includes in-depth interviews with four Ukrainian-American multidisciplinary women artists, integrated into historical research on Ukrainian and international avant-garde movements, biographical research on Maya Deren, and analysis of Deren’s filmography.

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