UPDATED: Dec. 4, 2014, at 5:10 p.m.

It’s quite possible you know her as the throat-slashing, pie-baking Mrs. Lovett. Or perhaps the ever-scurrying journalist Ruth Sherwood. And if you don’t actually know Liz K. Leimkuhler, the woman beneath these and many other roles, maybe that’s because she’s doing her job right. For Leimkuhler, acting requires the ability to not only know, but to be another.\xa0

“What draws me to theater is the opportunity to step into someone else’s shoes very intimately,” says Leimkuhler. “You’re not just reading a part, you are a part. You live as this person.” And as the checkerboard of posters that decorate a full wall of her Fairfax\xa0Hall single testify, Leimkuhler has lived many lives in her three and a half years at Harvard. \xa0

Leimkuhler has often been cast in roles that most would view as outlandish; in her acting she challenges herself to identify with these characters. Describing a realization she had while playing the cannibalistic and murderous Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd her sophomore year, Leimkuhler explains, “Everything she does has a motive and logic behind it. She loved Sweeney Todd and so everything was justified in her eyes. In order to play this character, I couldn’t think she was crazy.”

Since then, this desire to understand and validate her characters’ motivations has defined all her performances, most recently and most challengingly in this fall’s “Little Murders,” where Leimkuhler crossed genders to play a homophobic father who bullies and abuses his daughter’s fiancé.

Leimkuhler recognizes performance as a conscious activity that requires an audience. “The idea you’re performing means you’re performing for someone,” she says. “Whenever I’m in front of a group of people I’m not comfortable with or don’t know, something turns on and I’m performing. I enjoy that. I enjoy being this different person.”\xa0

The activation of this performance is not a barrier, but rather a catalyst. “I love being scrutinized. I love being watched. It draws something out of me that I cannot draw out alone,” Leimkuhler says. “When I sing an aria alone in a practice room it is never good enough, but if I sing this same aria in a room of a hundred people it is just worlds better.”

In fact, Leimkuhler actively distinguishes whether her performing self is on or off with the appellations “Liz” and “Elizabeth.” While the alliterative “Liz Leimkuhler” is perfect for the stage, new acquaintances, and other public functions, “Elizabeth” is reserved for close friends and family.

This interest in life and performance extends to Leimkuhler’s academic work as an organismic and evolutionary biology concentrator. Her first love in the animal kingdom is the panda, evident by her emerald panda-print dress and panda paraphernalia lining her shelves. Yet many unanswered attempts to research pandas in China forced Leimkuhler to look elsewhere to study nature.\xa0

Spurred by a casual dinner conversation with a friend, Leimkuhler found herself this past summer in Naples, Italy, conducting research on octopuses. She became enamored with the sea creatures. “They’re just like cats. They’re all individuals with their own personalities.” She notes that octopuses can change colors based on the situations they’re in, describing with particular wonder the “pattern of blue and white” that overtakes an octopus when it feels threatened. There’s a note of envy lingering on this description; perhaps Leimkuhler knows that as an actress, she can never quite do the same.\xa0

Leimkuhler first began her performance studies not in acting, but in voice, following a third-grade trip to a puppet opera in Austria. At Harvard, she is vice president of the Dunster House Opera Society and is a member of Keychange, a jazz and R&B a cappella group.\xa0

In her life off of the stage, Leimkuhler also serves as a Dorm Crew House Captain for Adams House, but promises that even in this non-theatrical environment, “we’re all divas in our own way. Everyone has an attitude, everyone has a personality.”\xa0

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

CORRECTION:\xa0Dec. 4, 2014 An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated\xa0where\xa0Elizabeth K. Leimkuhler \'15 lives. In fact, she lives in Fairfax Hall.