Her work has been exhibited at TATE Modern, MOMA, Center for Performance Research, Panoply Performance Lab, FADO Toronto, Queens Museum, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Rose Art Museum, Movement Research at Judson Church, Performer Stammtisch Berlin, Performance Space London, Abrons Art Center and other venues.
In “The Anxiety of Influence” she dressed like Marina Abramovic and sat across from her all day during “The Artist is Present” exhibition. Liftig’s work has been published and written about in New York Times Magazine, BOMB, The Wall Street Journal, Vogue Italia, PAJ, New York, Critical Correspondence, Theater, Art Papers, Hyperallergic, and others.
Liftig’s experimental film work has been screened in festivals in the UK, Canada, Spain, France, Sweden, and the Netherlands. She is a 2021 Connecticut Council for the Arts Emerging Arts Fellow in Creative Writing and a recipient of awards from Franklin Furnace and the Mertz Gilmore Foundation. Liftig is has received grant and residency support from MacDowell, Yaddo, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, New Museum, Bronx Museum of Art, and Flux Projects Atlanta.
Her first book, Holler Rat, a memoir, was a published by Abrams in 2023 and was USA Today best seller.
HOLLER RAT: A Memoir
From a critically acclaimed performance artist, a funny, vivid, and ultimately heartbreaking memoir about forging identity in the chasm between cultures and classes.
Anya Liftig grew up with a foot in two very different worlds: While her mother’s upbringing was so rural that the other kids called her “holler rat,” her father came from a comfortable, upper-middle-class Jewish family. Anya spent school years in affluent Connecticut and summers in the holler. Shaped by the experience, she would go on to win a scholarship to Yale and become an acclaimed artist, using provocative performances to explore the contradictions and unanswered questions of her life. But when the world Anya was building for herself shattered, she was forced to reconcile where she’d come from with who she was and who she wanted to be.
In Holler Rat, Liftig masterfully interweaves family lore from her Appalachian childhood with her performance art pieces and scenes of the yearlong period in which her life fell apart, and plumbs the cathartic self-reckoning that followed. She takes us from her Mamaw’s porch to Yale; from the site of a violent family land feud to a pre-gentrified Bushwick loft; and from a devastating childhood leg injury to having 243 raw eggs pelted at her in the name of art. In visceral, beautiful prose that ranges from raunchy and outrageous to sobering and tragic, Holler Rat is the origin story of an unconventional artistic life and a captivating account of the stumbling blocks, sacrifices, and discoveries along the way.