About Me – Elizabeth Khard

ABOUT ME

About Elizabeth Khard

Elizabeth Khard is a Belarus-born, New York–based Fusion Bellydance artist, choreographer, educator, creative director, and costume and headpiece designer.

Her work is centered not only around dance technique, but around helping people grow into more confident, creative, and expressive artists.

Elizabeth began dancing at the age of six with ballroom dance and discovered belly dance at ten, studying with Victoria Bunko. A few years later, after seeing Fusion Bellydance performed at competitions and discovering artists such as Zoe Jakes, Rachel Brice, and Sharon Kihara, she became fascinated by the style’s unusual movement vocabulary, visual aesthetics, and creative freedom.

Her transition into Fusion Bellydance happened around 2012–2013, when she was invited to create a Snake character for performances connected with the Year of the Snake. The costume, body art, and character concept created for that project became one of her first immersive stage experiences and strongly influenced the way she continues to approach performance today. The snake later became part of Elizabeth’s visual identity and logo.

Around the same time, Elizabeth received first-place awards at Fusion Bellydance competitions in Belarus and began teaching in 2013.

Over the years, she has trained with numerous internationally recognized Fusion Bellydance artists, including Zoe Jakes, Rachel Brice, Moria Chappell, Olga Meos, Yana Kremneva, Kira Lebedeva, Polina Shandarina, Agata Savitskaya, and others. Her movement background also includes contemporary dance, heels, vogue, waacking, dancehall, salsa, bachata, and other styles that continue to influence her approach to movement and creativity.

Teaching Philosophy

Technique is one of the foundations of Elizabeth’s teaching. Her work focuses strongly on isolations, micro-isolations, layering, body control, musicality, transitions, and creating clear and visually interesting movement.

But technique alone is never the final goal.

Elizabeth believes that every dancer has their own artistic language, and one of her main goals as a teacher is to help students discover it.

She creates a supportive space where dancers can experiment, make mistakes, ask questions, and try ideas without being afraid of doing something “wrong.” Creativity is treated as a skill that can be developed, not as something a person either naturally has or does not have.

Her students range from complete beginners to experienced performers. Depending on their goals, Elizabeth helps them develop body awareness, technique, musicality, stage presence, confidence, choreography, and artistic individuality.

She teaches through private and group classes, workshops, online education, creative laboratories, and festival Performance Projects.

Her workshops include both technical subjects — such as isolations, layering, and movement control — and creative topics focused on solo creation, choreography, stage presence, and building a complete performance.

For Elizabeth, a strong performance is not simply a collection of difficult movements. Technique, musicality, character, costume, visual presentation, and emotional connection should work together to create one complete experience for the audience.

Helping Dancers Become Artists

One of the most important parts of Elizabeth’s work is helping dancers move beyond simply learning choreography.

She works with students on how to develop an idea, make stronger creative choices, structure a solo, use the stage, build transitions, understand their visual strengths, and create a performance that feels personal rather than copied from someone else.

Her goal is never to make students dance like her.

It is to help them understand what makes them interesting.

Elizabeth can guide an artist through many different stages of the creative process — from movement and choreography to music editing, character development, costumes, headpieces, and visual concepts.

Because of her background in directing, production, design, and visual storytelling, she often looks at a dancer from several perspectives at once: not only how the movement feels in the body, but how it reads from the audience, how the costume supports it, how the music is structured, and how the entire image works together.

This allows her to help students create not just a dance, but a complete artistic experience.

Choreography, Performance Projects & Creative Direction

Elizabeth’s experience also extends into show production and creative direction.

From 2013 to 2020, she directed her own dance studio, Edem, in Grodno, Belarus. After relocating to New York, she became involved in multidisciplinary stage production and co-created more than ten full-length entertainment shows.

Her work has included directing, casting, costuming, staging, lighting and video concepts, music editing, and production.

Today, she increasingly brings this experience into Performance Projects for festivals and dance events. Dancers learn material in advance, work together through rehearsals, and develop the choreography into a polished stage piece.

These projects combine Elizabeth’s favorite areas of work: teaching, choreography, creativity, visual storytelling, and helping dancers experience what it means to become part of a complete production.

Beyond the Dance Studio

Elizabeth also creates costumes and sculptural headpieces through Elizabeth Khard Creations. Her recognizable stage looks include elaborate crowns, fantasy-inspired headpieces, and character-based designs.

She is also a co-founder of Vibe Space NYC, a dance and photo studio in Manhattan created as a welcoming creative space for dancers, photographers, videographers, performers, and other artists.

These different areas are closely connected in Elizabeth’s work. A dancer may begin by coming to her for technique and eventually develop a solo. That solo may grow into a new character, costume concept, performance project, or complete visual story.

Elizabeth sees her role as a creative guide who can help connect those pieces — movement, technique, creativity, stage presence, image, and visual presentation.

Photography

More recently, Elizabeth has discovered an even deeper connection with the world of photography, adding another creative language to her artistic journey.

After years of creating images through movement, choreography, costumes, and stage concepts, photography became a natural extension of the way she sees people and visual storytelling.

What she loves most is capturing women in a way that makes them feel beautiful, expressive, powerful, and seen. For Elizabeth, a photoshoot is not simply about taking a technically beautiful photograph — it is another opportunity to help someone reveal a different side of themselves.

Her experience as a dancer, choreographer, and creative director also influences the way she works behind the camera. She understands movement, body lines, posing, costumes, and how small details can completely transform an image.

Photography has become another source of creativity and happiness for Elizabeth — a way to capture beautiful moments, celebrate individuality, and turn them into something that can live beyond the moment itself.