After losing her lower legs and most of her fingers and thumbs, Bufano began her performance and dancing career when a professor at the University of Linz doing research on the lives of amputees discovered her web page and offered her a stipend to perform in Vienna. She toured with the AXIS Dance Company, performing works variously choreographed by Victoria Marks, Joe Goode, and Kate Weare to audiences in Austria, Croatia, Slovenia, and Canada, and performed to a packed house at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in a program honoring fellow amputee and dancer Homer Avila as well as at the Baryshnikov Arts Center and Judson Memorial Church in NYC, among other venues. Her dance work typically incorporated a variety of prosthetics and props, but also included segments where her unadorned body was the focus of the performance. According to Bufano she manipulated her body as a way to explore alternative locomotion, corporeal difference, her sexual identity, and animation/manipulation, interests which led to many fruitful collaborations. Bufano listed among her influences medical drawings, historical wax models and dolls, and optical toys; flip dolls and paper dolls; the structural aspects of Japanese jointed dolls, Hans Bellmer's doll work, Louise Bourgeois' cell installations, and the animation of Jan Švankmajer and the Quay Brothers. One of her main projects was a white muslin dress which turned into a squid, for which she sewed thousands of detailed suckers. "She loved sewing sculptures made of fabric," her brother remarked in a remembrance. "She had a thing for the creepy-cute, the exotic, the bizarre. Things that were dark but also beautiful." She explained her aesthetic and political goals when she claimed that:
Despite my own terror and discomfort in being watched, I am finding that being in front of viewers as a performer with deformity can produce a magnetic tension that could be developed into strength. I attempt to channel this tension by exaggerating the mode of physical difference.
My eye has always been drawn to abnormal forms... It's just that now my tool is my body. I'm still animating a form, but it's my own form... I'm not an astounding dancer... But being a performer with a deformity, I find that there's a gut response in audiences, an attraction/repulsion aspect to it that can be compelling. I just hope that there's a balance between that gut response and the substance of a performance.
Lisa Bufano committed suicide October 3, 2013 in San Francisco; no suicide note was found. Two months later, her brother reflected on the inexplicable nature of her death.
