Laurie Anderson, Artist in distribution, USA, 1947

Laurie Anderson was born in 1947 in Chicago, Illinois (USA), and lives in New York City. She completed her studies in Art History at Barnard College in 1969 and obtained an MFA in sculpture from Columbia in 1972. Anderson is working as an experimental musician and multimedia artist, whose work has been performed live throughout the world and exhibited in numerous prestigious art galleries. She has received honorary degrees from Cal Arts, the Philadelphia College of the Arts and the Pratt Institute, and she was NASA's first artist-in-residence. For Anderson, video serves primarily as a tool for documenting live performances that combine diverse elements such as experimental music and video projections with poignant, dryly humorous spoken word and song. A major issue in Anderson's work is the question of how language shapes possibilities for individual speech. Within this context, she playfully examines how artistic expression is controlled within the elitist circles of art production and reception. Her art comes from a fundamentally feminist perspective, attempting to reveal and subvert discursive constructions of feminine and masculine identity.