With deep sorrow our studio mourns the loss, on Tuesday, November 19th, of its co-founder Elizabeth Theiler Martin.

Elizabeth was our landscape designer, promotion director, design muse, and co-developer of the Dobbs Ferry Playhouse, home to our studio and rental apartments. Her verve, wit, subtle sense of humor and artistic sensibility infused our entire practice. She was a memorable and beautiful person and the beloved life partner of Stephen Tilly.

She grew up in Hastings-on-Hudson, the only child of Lillian Graham and Max Theiler, a medical researcher who won the Nobel Prize for his work developing the yellow fever vaccine. Dance classes as a child led, after The Masters School, to making dances for others including the choreography for Gilbert & Sullivan and Hasty Pudding shows at Harvard, where she graduated in the class of 1960. She went on to study with Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham, among others, and formed Elizabeth Martin & Company, which performed site-specific works in Boston. In the 1960s she was asked to choreograph a performance called “Riot”, which depicted a panel discussion that deteriorated into violence, using movement and freeze frames taken from photographs of riots after Martin Luther King’s assassination. It moved to New York, where it won an Obie. Despite its success, a newspaper strike prevented its planned move to Broadway.

After working as an arts consultant on the renewal of downtown Washington D.C., where she met Stephen Tilly, they moved to Hastings and then Dobbs Ferry. She apprenticed as a film editor intending to do documentaries but found more independence creating an animated film of her own. She fell in love with landscape design while working on a spec house and her own garden, then went on to earn a Landscape Design Certificate from the NY Botanical Garden. Outside her practice, she served on the boards of the Greater Hudson Heritage Network, Westchester County Historical Society, Lyndhurst, Echo Hills Counseling Center, Friends of Dobbs Ferry Waterfront Park, and the Dobbs Ferry Tree Consortium. Her spirit continues to infuse our work together.

Donations in Elizabeth Martin’s memory will be gratefully accepted by the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies. 100% of your gift supports science for the future of our planet.
https://www.caryinstitute.org/donate-now
By mail: Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, PO AB, Millbrook, NY 12545