Laurie Anderson

Laurie Anderson is an experimental performance artist, visual artist and musician from Glen Ellyn, United States. Her work spans art pop, avant-garde, electronic, experimental, modern classical and spoken word, and she is also described as an experimental art rock musician. A recurring feature across her different forms of work is storytelling.

Early life and education

Born in 1947 as Laura Phillips Anderson, she studies art history at Barnard College, where she graduates magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. She also attends Mills College in California and later earns an MFA in sculpture from Columbia University in 1972.

Performance work and recordings

Anderson performs in New York throughout the 1970s. Two early pieces, “New York Social Life” and “Time to Go,” appear on the 1977 compilation New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media alongside works by Pauline Oliveros and others.

She becomes more widely known in 1982 through the single “O Superman,” first issued in limited form on One Ten Records before being re-released by Warner Brothers after demand from the UK, where John Peel plays the record. The single reaches number two on the British national pop chart. “O Superman” is part of the larger stage work United States and also appears on the album Big Science.

Her albums from the 1980s sell strongly despite being labelled avant-garde. Later work includes a multimedia presentation inspired by Moby Dick.

Film, media and other projects

Anderson stars in and directs the 1986 concert film Home of the Brave. She also composes the soundtracks for the Spalding Gray films Swimming to Cambodia and Monster in a Box. Her work extends into voice acting in the animated film The Rugrats Movie and into digital media with the 1994 CD-ROM Puppet Motel.

She writes a supplemental article on the cultural character of New York City for the Encyclopædia Britannica and hosts the PBS series Alive from Off Center in the late 1980s, for which she produces the short film What You Mean We?

Themes and collaborations

One of the central themes in Anderson’s work is the effect of technology on human relationships and communication. She collaborates with William Burroughs, Mitchell Froom, Arto Lindsay, Peter Gabriel, Perry Hoberman, David Sylvian, Jean Michel Jarre, Hector Zazou, Nona Hendryx, David Van Tieghem and Lou Reed. She also works with comedian Andy Kaufman in the late 1970s, with a romantic involvement hinted at in some of her spoken word performances about him.

Later work and recognition

Anderson rarely revisits older material, although themes and lyrics sometimes reappear. She tours a selection of her best-known pieces in 2001, and one performance recorded in New York a week after the September 11 attacks is released as the double CD Live in New York in 2002.

In 2003, she becomes NASA’s first and only artist-in-residence, which inspires The End of the Moon. She later premieres Delusion at the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Games, with the work commissioned by the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad and the Barbican Centre in London. In 2010 she curates the Vivid Sydney festival with Lou Reed.

She releases Homeland on Canal Street Communications, Inc., with production assistance from Lou Reed and Roma Baran. The album includes contributions from John Zorn, Kieran Hebden of Four Tet, Antony Hegarty and Tuvan throat singers, and it features guitar from Lou Reed.