Clare grew up in a small town in Hertfordshire. She studied for a BA in Film and Drama at Reading University, followed by a MA at The Central School of Speech and Drama where she graduated with Distinction. Clare was a self-funding student and worked all the way through training. Her job as a reader for the BBC turned into a full time job, and part time she worked with Sphinx Theatre Company using actors to test writer’s ideas. It was here that Lizzimore became fascinated by a non-performative, almost anti-presented, style of acting.
In 2005 she read Duncan Macmillan’s The Most Humane Way to Kill a Lobster and determined to direct it she left the security of the BBC, raised funding, found a theatre and staged the production at Theatre 503, she transformed the theatre space and was lauded for a coup de theatre in a spectacular moment where water flooded the stage; it was called ‘A little Wonder’ by the Guardian and received rave reviews.
Soon after Clare won the Regional Theatre Young Directors Scheme and became Resident Director at Glasgow’s Citizen’s Theatre, where she again won The Robert David Macdonald award for bold European work. She decided to stage Franz Zavier Kroetz’s Tom Fool. What she saw in his drama and what was becoming so inextricable with her own work was the drama of small joys and everyday dilemmas – how the mundane became profound. The production was nominated for four C.A.T.S awards, and transferred to The Bush Theatre. Over the next ten years she went on to direct the premiers of new plays by such writers as Nick Payne, Mark Ravenhill, Leo Butler, Robert Holman, Mike Bartlett, and Amy Rosenthal, in theatres across the U.K, including The Royal Court, Manchester Royal Exchange, and Glasgow Citizens. In 2015 her production of Bull, by Mike Bartlett won the Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in an Affiliate Theatre.
Clare’s love of new writing grew into a love of writing and in 2013 her first play MINT was produced by the Royal Court as part of Vicky Featherstone’s inaugural Open Court Season and it was reviewed as ‘cumulatively devastating…worthy of Edward Bond’ by the Independent, her second play ‘Animal’ went on in Washington and N.Y. and was nominated for The Charles MacArthur Award for Outstanding New Play or Musical. Clare is now both a writer and director and is currently under commission to The Almeida Theatre.