Lisa Bufano

[5][6] A competitive gymnast as a child[6][7] (and a go-go dancer in college),[7][8] she became a bilateral below-the-knee and total finger-thumb amputee due to a life-threatening staphylococcus bacterial infection at the age of 21.

[6][9] After losing her lower legs and most of her fingers and thumbs, 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][10] She toured from 2006 to 2010 with the AXIS Dance Company,[4] performing works variously choreographed by Victoria Marks, Joe Goode, and Kate Weare to audiences in Austria, Croatia, Slovenia, and Canada, and performed to a packed house at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts[11] in a program honoring fellow amputee and dancer Homer Avila[12] (featured in Modern Dance Videos)[13] as well as at the Baryshnikov Arts Center and Judson Memorial Church, among other venues.

[17] According to Bufano she manipulated her body as a way to explore alternative locomotion (at age 34 she ran several miles a day on high-tech carbon fiber prosthetic legs),[3][9] corporeal difference, her sexual identity[18] (an aspect of her work which was of particular interest to the artistic LGBT community),[19] and animation/manipulation, interests which led to many fruitful collaborations.

One of her main projects was a white muslin dress which turned into a squid, for which she sewed thousands of detailed suckers.

"[9] 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.

[21]She likewise explained during her time at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: My eye has always been drawn to abnormal forms ...

[9]More than a year after her death, her work, along with that by Cara Levine, Shari Paladino and Sadie Wilcox, was included in Four Choreographies at the Worth Ryder Art Gallery in Berkeley, California.