Name: SCAD deFINE ART honoree lecture: Laurie Anderson
Start: 2026-02-25T17:00:00-05:00
End: 2026-02-25T18:00:00-05:00
Location: Trustees Theater

SCAD deFINE ART honoree lecture: Laurie Anderson

Join SCAD deFINE ART 2026 honoree Laurie Anderson as she takes the stage for a multimedia lecture that illuminates her celebrated career and engages themes in her SCAD Museum of Art exhibition All in Your Head. Known for work that has pushed boundaries and defied categorization across more than five decades, Anderson has pioneered the experimental use of technology, music, spoken word, and moving image in performances and installations. Experience Anderson’s cutting-edge work in this special SCAD deFINE ART keynote event.
This event is free and open to the public and presented as part of SCAD deFINE ART 2026.
About the artist
Laurie Anderson (b. 1947, Glen Ellyn, Ill.; lives and works in New York) 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 has created numerous audio-visual installations as well as films, including 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, Anderson has collaborated with Brian Eno, Jean-Michel Jarre, William S. Burroughs, Peter Gabriel, Robert Wilson, Christian McBride, and Philip Glass. Her works for quartets and orchestras, such as Songs for Amelia (2001), have been played in festivals and concert halls around the world, and she has invented a series of instruments and electronic sculptures.
Anderson has published 10 books and been nominated for five Grammy Awards throughout her recording career with Warner Records and Nonesuch. She released Landfall, a collaboration with the Kronos Quartet that 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, and Molissa Fenley; and theater productions including plays by Robert Lepage. She has created works for National Public Radio, France Culture, and the BBC. Anderson has also curated several large festivals including Vivid Sydney (2010) and Meltdown at Royal Festival Hall in London (1997).
Anderson’s visual work has been featured in many galleries and museums. In 2003, the Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon in France produced a touring retrospective of her work titled 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 (2021–22), 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 the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. Anderson’s three virtual reality works — Chalkroom, Aloft, and To the Moon, collaborations with the artist Hsin-Chien Huang — have won several awards including Best VR Experience at the 74th 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.
Anderson 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 66th 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 Australian Institute for Machine Learning, where she was an artist in residence in 2020. Anderson recently debuted her latest show, ARK: United States Part V, commissioned by the Manchester International Festival, in late 2024.
Anderson’s 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.