Laura Phillips "Laurie" Anderson (born June 5, 1947) is an American avant-garde artist,[2][3] musician and filmmaker whose work spans performance art, pop music, and multimedia projects.

[3] Initially trained in violin and sculpting,[4] Anderson pursued a variety of performance art projects in New York City during the 1970s, focusing particularly on language, technology, and visual imagery.

[5] Anderson's creative output has also included theatrical and documentary works, voice acting, art installations, and a CD-ROM.

Two early pieces, "New York Social Life" and "Time to Go", are included in the 1977 compilation New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media, along with works by Pauline Oliveros and others.

Many of Anderson's earliest recordings remain unreleased or were issued only in limited quantities, such as her first single, "It's Not the Bullet that Kills You (It's the Hole)".

Among the musicians on these early recordings are Peter Gordon on saxophone, Scott Johnson on guitar, Ken Deifik on harmonica, and Joe Kos on drums.

[15] In 1978, she performed at the Nova Convention, a major conference involving many counter-culture figures and rising avant-garde musical stars, including William S. Burroughs, Philip Glass, Frank Zappa, Timothy Leary, Malcolm Goldstein, John Cage, and Allen Ginsberg.

[18] Anderson became widely known outside the art world in 1981 with the single "O Superman", originally released in a limited quantity by B. George's One Ten Records, which ultimately reached number two on the British charts.

This was followed by the back-to-back releases of her albums Mister Heartbreak and United States Live, the latter of which was a five-LP (and, later, four-CD) recording of her two-evening stage show at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

[22] She also appeared in a television special produced by Nam June Paik broadcast on New Year's Day 1984, titled "Good Morning, Mr.

[25] In the same year, Anderson appeared in The Human Face, a feature arts documentary directed by artist-filmmakers Nichola Bruce and Michael Coulson for BBC television.

In 1994, she created a CD-ROM titled Puppet Motel, which was followed by Bright Red, co-produced by Brian Eno, and another spoken-word album, The Ugly One with the Jewels.

During this time, she wrote a supplemental article on the cultural character of New York City for the Encyclopædia Britannica[27] and created multimedia presentations, including one inspired by Moby-Dick (Songs and Stories from Moby Dick, 1999–2000).

Zazou's album Strong Currents (2003), which brought together well-known soloists, features her alongside Melanie Gabriel, Irene Grandi and Jane Birkin, among others.

She narrated Ric Burns' Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film, which was first televised in September 2006 as part of the PBS American Masters series.

Anderson also performed in Came So Far for Beauty, the Leonard Cohen tribute event held in the Point Theatre, Dublin, Ireland, on October 4–5, 2006.

Material from Homeland was performed at small work-in-progress shows in New York throughout May 2007 supported by a four-piece band with lighting and video visuals mixed live by Willie Williams and Mark Coniglio, respectively.

A European tour of the Homeland work in progress included performances on September 28–29, 2007, at the Olympia Theatre, Dublin; on October 17–19 at the Melbourne International Arts Festival; and in Russia at the Moscow Dom Muzyky concert hall on April 26, 2008.

The work was performed in Toronto, Canada, on June 14, 2008, with husband Lou Reed, making the "Lost Art of Conversation" a duet with vocals and guitar.

The first public showings of this work-in-progress took place in Calgary, Alberta, in January 2012 as part of Theatre Junction Grand's 2011–12 season and One Yellow Rabbit's annual arts festival, the High Performance Rodeo.

[40] Anderson was named the Inaugural Distinguished Artist-In-Residence at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, in May 2012.

Inspired by her experience of Hurricane Sandy, Nonesuch Records said, "Landfall juxtaposes lush electronics and traditional strings by Kronos with Anderson's powerful descriptions of loss, from water-logged pianos to disappearing animal species to Dutch karaoke bars.

"[47] Chalkroom is a virtual reality work by Anderson and Taiwanese artist Hsin-Chien Huang in which the reader flies through an enormous structure made of words, drawings, and stories.

[50] Anderson was appointed the 2021 Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University and presented a series of six lectures titled Spending the War Without You: Virtual Backgrounds over two semesters.

[56] In the late 1990s, she collaborated with Interval Research to develop an instrument she called a "talking stick", a six-foot-long (1.8 m) baton-like MIDI controller that can access and replicate sounds.

She can be seen using a later generation of this device in her film Home of the Brave during the Late Show segment in which she manipulates a sentence recorded by William S. Burroughs.

The computer rearranges the sound fragments into continuous strings or random clusters that are played back in overlapping sequences to create new textures.

[59] The cover of Homeland depicts Anderson in character as Bergamot, with streaks of black makeup to give her a moustache and thick, masculine eyebrows.

In "The Cultural Ambassador", a piece on her album The Ugly One with the Jewels, Anderson explained some of her perspective on the character: (Anderson:) I was carrying a lot of electronics so I had to keep unpacking everything and plugging it in and demonstrating how it all worked, and I guess I did seem a little fishy—a lot of this stuff wakes up displaying LED program readouts that have names like Atom Smasher, and so it took a while to convince them that they weren't some kind of portable espionage system.

So I've done quite a few of these sort of impromptu new music concerts for small groups of detectives and customs agents and I'd have to keep setting all this stuff up and they'd listen for a while and they'd say: So um, what's this?