Phillips' collaborations include pieces with Nam June Paik and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and her work has been presented by the Cleveland Orchestra, IBM, and the World Financial Center.
[3] She began attending Bennington College in 1969, where she studied with Cora Cohen, Pat Adams, Philips Wofford, instrument-maker Gunnar Schoenbeck, Joel Chadabe, and Thomas Standish.
In 1970, Phillips created a work called Sound Structures, which was an installation that made use of a radio frequency capacitance field generated from a piece of metal placed under a rug.
Crucial to the artist's design of this complex environment were the important sonic possibilities unlocked by spontaneous group formation and play among the participants.
[6] In 1971, Phillips presented Electronic Banquet at the Eighth Annual Avant Garde Festival of New York, held at the 69th Infantry Regiment Armory on November 19.
Phillips later went on to collaborate with Nam June Paik and dancer Robert Kovich from the Merce Cunningham Dance Company on a commissioned piece.
In 1972, Phillips participated in the Ninth Annual Avant Garde Festival of New York, held aboard the Alexander Hamilton, a riverboat at the South Street Seaport in Manhattan.
[8] In 1974, in collaboration with artist Yoshi Wada, Phillips created a responsive sound installation using RF fields entitled Sum Time at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York.
Their multiple locations and complex electronics interacted with the movements of participants in the installation space, resulting in tones that ranged from dense drones to sounds like breathing, depending on the direction and speed of the wind.
[6] The second installation of Windspun, in collaboration with Creative Time in New York, was at an alternative energy site operated by the Bronx Frontier Development Corporation on the East River in 1981.
For her reconception of the piece in the lobby at the Albright–Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, Phillips used updated technology to create an interactive sonic environment, in which participants’ movements through the installation trigger modulations in sounds from the Niagara river at various points.
[17] In 2018, Phillips collaborated with her daughter, artist Heidi Howard, on the creation of Relative Fields in a Garden, a large scale multi-media installation at the Queens Museum.
Howard invoked a synaesthetic approach–in which she related her brushstrokes and color choices to the experience of hearing Phillips’ sound selections as they played in the atrium of the museum.