Theatrical Keynotes
&
Narrative Interventions
Dr. Liz DeBetta brings a unique blend of award-winning performance and scholarly rigor to the stage, transforming personal truth into collective healing.
Keynotes should do more than share information, they should be an intervention. As a scholar-artist with a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies, I use the stage to challenge silence and center marginalized truths. My work bridges the gap between clinical theory and visceral intimacy, offering a roadmap for what I call re-narrativizing: becoming the subject rather than the object of our own stories.
Booking Options
Conference Plenaries: Anchor your event with a signature closing performance that leaves your audience transformed and connected.
University Residencies: A multi-day "bundle" including a performance or screening of Un-M-Othered, a graduate seminar on narrative praxis, and student-focused healing workshops.
Professional Development: Trauma-informed workshops for Adoption Professionals, Social Workers, Educators, and Psychologists focused on agency and identity.
Featured Programs
Un-M-Othered
Excerpt from my award-winning solo work Un-M-Othered. The piece begins with a voice-over of a “Meditation for Adopted People,” accompanied by embodied movement and a full-body scan that invites the audience into an experience of presence, memory, and embodied intimacy. Through poetry, narrative, and references to trauma and epigenetics, the full piece explores adoptee identity, maternal separation, and the afterlife of loss carried in the body. This section exemplifies my artistic practice of using embodied storytelling to translate lived experience and cultural analysis into performance and is how I create space for witnessing, reclamation, and collective healing.
Me, She, They: Our Bodies Are Not the Problem
Me, She, They is a spoken word performance examining how women’s bodies, voices, and choices are shaped and constrained by patriarchal systems of control. Originally created as a solo work that received the Toni A. Gregory Award in 2018, the piece later evolved into a collective storytelling performance in which I perform sections of my original text while six women speak both my words and their own lived experiences. Drawing on feminist and interdisciplinary inquiry, the work explores how cultural messages around sexuality, shame, and “acceptable” womanhood are internalized as guilt, anxiety, and self-objectification, and how women are taught to silence themselves in order to belong. In 2022, the project expanded into an arts-based research and storytelling initiative supported by a Presidential Faculty Research Grant. This offering reflects my artistic methodology: using personal narrative as a catalyst for shared authorship, transforming individual testimony into collective witnessing.
What Organizers & Audiences Are Saying
“Audiences consistently describe the show as life-changing: the first time they felt seen, heard, and understood... a catalyst for collective healing.”
“What a work of both physical and emotional intensity, a depiction of the agony and chaotic inner world of an adoptee. It so clearly and powerfully portrays the journey from the primal wound of maternal separation — the trauma, longing, and dissociation from self — into reunion and healing. Such an honor to share in that vulnerability and see the collective emotions around family separation expressed on stage.”
“My spouse died of cancer at the end of 2022, and I’ve since been channeling my grief into my PhD work because it provides a way to process this big, scary thing in a space that feels safe. Your workshop was another valuable tool for my journey, helping me reflect in ways I didn’t expect. I really enjoyed the exercises and found your approach to be both insightful and grounding. It’s clear how much thought and heart you put into your work, and I’m so grateful to have had the opportunity to engage with it. ”