MAGIC / THEATER
Liz Toonkel (Los Angeles)
Magic for Animals
For touring/booking please email Liz Toonkel: liztoonkel@gmail.com
Liz Toonkel achieves the impossible, fusing heartfelt sleepover confessions with insane animal magic.”
Her wit, warm persona, and at times vulnerability, are enough to make us follow her wherever she goes, even when it is challenges our own preconceptions about our place in the animal kingdom. ”
…In Liz Toonkel’s daring performance, she showed us vulnerability, empathy, and above all humor,”
– Grace Courvoisier, L.A. Dance Chronicle
Magic for Animals is a one woman magic show about agency, consent, and animal rights. Multidisciplinary artist and production designer, Liz Toonkel, uses humor, charm, and continuous storytelling to offer an antidote to the gendered and speciesist history of magic. The show examines how we treat animals and pushes the audience to reconsider how we treat one another.
Part of Toonkel’s narrative in the magic community has been progressing its culture of inclusivity. Her presence and perspectives as a queer woman in a historically male-dominated space bring to light conversations about representation and diversity in magic. In this show, Toonkel never uses live animals as props, extending questions of representation to all beings.
You can help Magic For Animals continue its tour!
Latest News
Magic For Animals at Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Photography from Colin Hattersley Photography 
Liz Toonkel. Photo by Myles Pettengill 
Liz Toonkel performing Magic for Animals at the 2021 LAX Festival 
Liz Toonkel performing Magic for Animals at the 2023 Cincy Fringe 
Magic For Animals at Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Photography from Colin Hattersley Photography 
Liz Toonkel performing Magic for Animals at the 2023 Cincy Fringe
About Liz Toonkel
Liz Toonkel is a creative force who believes in the storytelling power of design in theater and visual art. Her work, which ranges from performance, installations, and video art, strives to wield a power that serves the LGBTQIA community, BIPOC, and womxn. Liz is passionate about projects that inspire social change through humor, spectacle and transgression. Her practice breathes life into animals, female archetypes, and human body parts to reveal those specific points of view. Using character, costume and sleight of hand, Liz creates spaces of relatability, visibility and provocation. Pulling from her expertise as a production and costume designer for film and theater, she wields entertainment value as a point of access.
She recently performed and displayed her artwork at Cincinnati Fringe Festival, Aarhus Festuge with Live Art Denmark, Honor Fraser Gallery, LAX Festival, ltd Gallery and the 2016 Queer Biennial in Los Angeles. Liz is nominated for an Art Director’s Guild award for her production design of the Oscar nominated animated feature film Marcel the Shell with Shoes On. She also production designed the Independent Spirit Award nominated Emily the Criminal starring Aubrey Plaza.
Liz has been a resident at Asylum Arts, Automata, PAM, The Marble House Project and the Transart Institute in Berlin. She earned her BFA at New York University’s Tisch School for the Arts in Film & Television Production with a minor in Gender & Sexuality and holds a dual MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in Art & Technology and Scenic Design. Liz was the first time recipient of the Calarts Distinguished Young Alumnx of the Year Award in 2023 for her work across the arts. She is a magician member of the Academy of Magical Arts.
