Laurie Anderson is a writer, director, composer, visual artist, musician and
vocalist who has created groundbreaking works that span the worlds of art,
theater, experimental music, and technology. Her recording career was
launched by O Superman in 1981.
Anderson’s live shows range from simple spoken word to expansive
multimedia stage performances such as the eight-hour United States
(1982), Empty Places (1990), Songs and Stories from Moby Dick (1999),
and Delusion (2010). In 2002, Anderson was appointed the first artist-in-
residence of NASA which culminated in her 2004 touring solo
performance The End of the Moon.
Anderson had created numerous audio-visual installations as well as films-
the feature film Home of the Brave (1986), Carmen (1992), and Hidden
Inside Mountains (2005). Her film Heart of a Dog (2015) was chosen as
an official selection of the 2015 Venice and Toronto Film Festivals.
In the same year, her exhibition Habeas Corpus opened at the Park
Avenue Armory to wide critical acclaim and in 2016 she was the recipient of
Yoko Ono’s Courage Award for the Arts for that project.
As a performer and musician, she has collaborated with many people
including Brian Eno, Jean-Michel Jarre, William S. Burroughs, Peter
Gabriel, Robert Wilson, Christian McBride and Philip Glass.
Her works for quartets and orchestras, Songs for Amelia (2001), has been
played in festivals and concert halls around the world and she has invented
a series of instruments and electronic sculptures.
Anderson has published ten books and been nominated for five Grammys
throughout her recording career with Warner Records and Nonesuch. She
released Landfall, a collaboration with the Kronos Quartet, which received
a Grammy award in 2018.
As a composer, Anderson has contributed music to films by Wim Wenders
and Jonathan Demme, dance pieces by Bill T. Jones, Trisha Brown,
Molissa Fenley, and scores for theater productions including plays by
Robert LePage. She has created pieces for National Public Radio, France
Culture and the BBC. She has curated several large festivals including the Vivid Festival in Sydney (2010) and the Meltdown Festival at Royal Festival
Hall in London (1997).
Her visual work has been featured in many galleries and museums
including in 2003, the Musée d'art contemporain de Lyon in France
produced a touring retrospective of her work entitled The Record of the
Time: Sound in the Work of Laurie Anderson. In 2010 a retrospective of
her visual and installation work opened in São Paulo, Brazil and later
traveled to Rio de Janeiro. Anderson’s largest solo exhibition at The
Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C., titled The
Weather (2021-2022), showcased the artist’s storytelling process through
her work in video, performance, installation, painting, and other media.
Her visual work is on long term display at MASS MoCA and her three
virtual reality works, Chalkroom, Aloft, and To The Moon, collaborations
with the artist Hsin-Chien Huang, won several awards including Best VR
Experience at the 74 th Venice International Film Festival in 2017 and were
featured in the Cannes Film Festival in 2019.
A retrospective of her work opened in 2023 at Moderna Museet in
Stockholm.
She has received numerous honorary doctorates, prizes and awards
including the Guggenheim Fellowship, Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, and
the Wolf Prize. In 2024 she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from
the Recording Academy at the 66 th Grammy Awards, the Stephen Hawking
Medal for Science Communication at the Starmus VII Festival, and the
Gold Medal for Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
In 2021 she served as Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard
University and delivered the Norton lectures as video, now available online.
She has worked on numerous projects in AI with the Machine Learning
Institute in Adelaide, Australia where she was artist in residence in 2020.
Anderson continues to tour her evolving performance The Art of Falling and
is working on an opera, ARK, commissioned by the Manchester
International Festival, premiering in 2024.
Her life partner as well as her collaborator was Lou Reed from 1992
onward. They married in 2008 and worked on numerous projects together
until his death in 2013. Anderson lives in New York City.