Litz Pisk was born Alizia Pisk in Vienna (Austria-Hungary, now Austria) into a middle-class, progressive Jewish family in 1909 and studied stage architecture and painting at the State School of Art and Crafts in the city. Concerned with rising anti-Semitism, she immigrated to England in 1937, where she taught Movement at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and the Old Vic Theatre School in London, and at Bath Academy of Art. She also taught pottery at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts and exhibited her drawings at the Redfern Gallery and Newlyn Art Gallery, among other venues.
Artist Litz Pisk was born Alizia Pisk in Vienna, Austria-Hungary (now Austria) in 1909 into a middle-class, progressive Jewish family, named after her father's favourite book, Alice in Wonderland (Alitzia in Wunderland). Aged 15, she enrolled at the State School of Art and Crafts, studying stage architecture with one of Max Reinhardt's designers, Oskar Strnad, and Kinetism with Franz Cizek. In 1932 she designed Bertold Brecht and Kurt Weill’s first production The Rise and Fail of the Town Mahoganny. Having a considerable talent for drawing, she also made sketches and caricatures of prominent Viennese cultural figures, especially actors and dancers, to accompany reviews in local newspapers. In the autumn of 1932, she had her first exhibition of drawings, stage designs and costume designs at the Perles bookshop in central Vienna.
With the political situation worsening in Austria, especially for Jews, Pisk began to consider emigration. She made several reconnaissance visits to England from 1933 onwards, and finally immigrated in 1937. She started teaching movement and painting at Dartington Hall in Devon, with Michael Chekhov, Anton's nephew, before moving to London. Initially, she lodged at Swiss Cottage, an area popular with German-speaking refugees, in the house of Lillie Oberwarth, a British Jew who opened her home on Buckhurst Crescent to European émigrés. Pisk was soon employed to contribute theatrical caricatures to the Evening Standard and the News Chronicle. Shortly afterwards, she started to teach movement at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) until 1942. Pisk`s first solo exhibition was held at the prestigious Redfern Gallery in London in 1944, where she showed 41 pen and brush drawings under the name 'Lizzi Pisk'. During the Second World War, she worked with orphaned children in Cambridge. In 1947 she was employed as Senior Instructor in Movement and Dance at the Old Vic Theatre School in London (1947–51), later joining the Bath Academy of Art (1953–56) as a teacher of movement and drawing. Following this, Pisk spent a period as a student (and later, as a teacher) of pottery at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts in south London, followed by a teaching post at South West Herts College of Further Education, where she taught pottery from 1957. As a pottery tutor Pisk trained in and then taught from the tradition of craftsmanship developed by English studio potter, Bernard Leach CBE. She continued to teach movement in Britain (including as an influential tutor at the Central School of Speech and Drama during the 1960s) and in Sweden and worked on several productions in the theatre (among others, for the Royal Shakespeare Company and National Theatre), as well as on television and film (she choreographed the movement for actor Vanessa Redgrave in the film Isadora).
After her retirement in 1970 Pisk moved to Cornwall, purchasing a home on Trencrom Hill near St Ives. In 1975 she published her seminal book on movement, The Actor and His Body (which remains revised and in print). The New Art Centre in London held two solo exhibitions of her work (1980 and 1982), followed by a major retrospective of her drawings at the Newlyn Art Gallery in 1986. The same year, her work was included in the important survey exhibition, Art in Exile in Great Britain 1933–1945, held in West Berlin in 1986 and which then toured in reconfigured format to the Camden Art Centre. Litz Pisk died in St Ives, Cornwall, England in 1997. In April 2019, as part of the Insiders Outsiders cultural festival celebrating the contribution of the so-called Hitler émigrés to British visual culture, Dr Marian Malet presented Litz Pisk’s Pedagogic and Artistic Influence on Post-War British Theatre in conjunction with Ayse Tashkiran, movement director and course leader of the MA MFA Movement: Directing and Teaching course at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London. Tashkiran was a Society for Theatre Research (STR) Award recipient in 2015 for her research into movement direction in Britain. The award also supported publication of the 4th edition of The Actor and his Body with a new, in-depth introduction illuminating the roots of Pisk's movement work from Austria to England. At this time the Central School also named a rehearsal studio in her honour, recognising Pisk's legacy as an important practitioner in actor movement. The naming ceremony was attended by pioneering British movement directors Jane Gibson and Sue Lefton who were both taught by Pisk in the 1960s at Central and who both contributed to the revised publication. Pisk's work is not currently held in any UK public collections.