Liz began her career as a fashion designer in 1988. Her style was inspired by futuristic superheroes and medieval armour. She used materials such as vinyl, plastic and polyurethane to bring her fantastic creations to life.
In 1990 Liz began working closely with Édouard Lock, founder of the Montreal dance company La La Human Steps. She designed the costumes for his shows Infante c'est destroy (1991), 2 (1995), Exaucé/Salt (1999), Amelia (2002), André Auria (2002) for the Opéra de Paris and Amjad (2007).
Other choreographers and dance companies turn to Liz regularly because of her ability to combine costumes and body movement. Among others she has worked for la Compagnie Marie Chouinard. Margie Gillis, Bill Coleman, José Navas, O Vertigo, Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal, the Washington Ballet, the National Ballet of Canada, Mannheim Theater and Stuttgart Ballet (Germany).
Since founding her own company Vandal Costumes in 1992 with her partner Yveline Bonjean, Liz has created and innovated costumes in the fields of fashion, theatre, opera, music and film. The Backstreet Boys hired her to design the costumes for their Black 'n Blue tour and her work appeared in the films The Lathe of Heaven directed by Philip Haas and La Turbulence des fluides directed by Manon Briand, both released in 2002.
OVO marks the first time Liz has worked with Cirque du Soleil. “I have taken full advantage of all the resources available in the Cirque costume shop,” she says. "I explored techniques of transforming material in order to evoke, not imitate, insects. Pleating, dyeing and the application of various finishes gives the costumes a third dimension. The end result is a sort of ‘organic origami’ that resembles muscles and shells. This approach makes it possible to raise the costumes to a level of poetry and give them an evocative texture."
Liz Vandal was born in Montreal in 1965.