Projects

Elizabeth Yochim’s creative projects explore the intersection of ritual, movement, and myth through site-specific and community-centered performance. From the shadow-lit corridors of historic mausoleums to the open landscapes of deserts, coastlines, and Italian ruins, her work invites audiences into embodied experiences of memory, grief, and renewal. Each project—"Mythology Series", "Rite of Passage", "Essence", Requiem", "The Altar of Kinship", and her ongoing Angelbird/Shadow Bird mythology—serves as a living inquiry into how the body holds story, lineage, and transformation. Rooted in rigorous research and shaped by collaborations with composers, poets, filmmakers, and vocalists, these performances blend movement, music, and mythopoetic narrative to create contemporary rituals that reconnect individuals and communities with their deeper human and ecological inheritance. Through these works, Yochim cultivates a practice where performance becomes both artistic expression and embodied scholarship.

Italian Rituals

Italian Rituals is a series of site-based performances created in Italy’s ancient landscapes—from Rome’s sacred roads to the nuraghi of Sardinia. Blending movement, myth, and ceremony, Elizabeth transforms historic thresholds into living rituals of memory and renewal. Each work invites audiences into an intimate encounter with grief, ancestry, and the unseen.

Persephone Embracing Hades

Ritual performance collaborating with poet and photographer Don Norman to reimagine mythologies with the feminine as the initiator. "Persephone Embracing Hades", performed in Death Valley National Park, California, represents the cyclical nature of life and death and their mutual embrace. This is a three-part series to be completed, exhibited and published in 2026.

Psyche Courting Poseidon

Ritual performance collaborating with poet and photographer Don Norman to reimagine mythologies with the feminine as the initiator. "Psyche Courting Poseidon” was performed in Point Dume, Malibu, California, and represents the subconscious recognizing the necessity of the storm. This is a three-part series to be completed, exhibited and published in 2026.

The Bird Chronicles, A Memoir

The Bird Chronicles is a two-volume mythic memoir tracing Elizabeth’s transformation from the tender guidance of the Angelbird to the powerful emergence of the Shadow Bird. Through family inheritances, heartbreaks, unexpected allies, and the long road of creative self-discovery, she follows the thread of a childhood dream once abandoned: to become an actress. From love lost to love reclaimed, and from grief to redemption, the story charts her evolution into a street performer whose art—and life—are ultimately shaped by the birds that rise from her own becoming.

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Flight of the Angelbird, a children's story

Once upon a time there was a girl named Anna who had two things she loved: dancing and birds... A children's story about a little girl who finds an unlikely ally in realizing her dream to become a dancer.

Requiem, Nuraghe Piscu, Sardinia

First steps on Sardinian land carried me to the top of the ancient stones, meeting the horizon as the Shadow Bird. Entering the Nuraghe became a passage from the mundane to the sacred, each stone guiding me into the realm of the dea madre and the dead. As I offered my ritual, a second grief opened—a memorial for a childhood friend whose ceremony I could not attend. The two remembrances merged into one gesture, honoring both the seen and unseen. Photographs captured by Domenico Cortese, @sardinianphotographer