Īnderson became widely known outside the art world in 1981 with the single ' O Superman,' originally released in a limited quantity by B. In 1987, Anderson was awarded an honorary doctorate in the fine arts from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. In 1982, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts-Film. In 1980, Anderson was awarded an honorary doctorate from the San Francisco Art Institute. She also worked with comedian Andy Kaufman in the late 1970s. Burroughs, Philip Glass, Frank Zappa, Timothy Leary, Malcolm Goldstein, John Cage, and Allen Ginsberg. 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. ĭuring the late 1970s, Anderson made a number of additional recordings that were either released privately or included on compilations of avant-garde music, most notably releases by the Giorno Poetry Systems label run by New York poet John Giorno, an early intimate of Andy Warhol. Photographs and descriptions of many of these early performances were included in Anderson's retrospective book Stories from the Nerve Bible. 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. 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).' That song, along with 'New York Social Life' and about a dozen others, was originally recorded for use in an art installation that consisted of a jukebox that played the different Anderson compositions, at the Holly Solomon Gallery in New York City.

She also recorded a lecture for Vision, a set of artist's lectures released by Crown Point Press as a set of six LPs. Two other pieces were included on Airwaves, a collection of audio pieces by various artists. 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. One of her most-cited performances, Duets on Ice, which she conducted in New York and other cities around the world, involved her playing the violin along with a recording while wearing ice skates with the blades frozen into a block of ice the performance ended only when the ice had melted away. Career 1970s Īnderson performed in New York during the 1970s.

In the early 1970s, she worked as an art instructor, as an art critic for magazines such as Artforum, and illustrated children's books -the first of which was titled The Package, a mystery story in pictures alone. In 1970, she drew the underground comix Baloney Moccasins, which was published by George DiCaprio.

Her first performance-art piece - a symphony played on automobile horns - was performed in 1969. magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, studying art history. She attended Mills College in California, and after moving to New York in 1966, graduated in 1969 from Barnard College with a B.A. She graduated from Glenbard West High School. She had seven siblings, and on weekends she studied painting at the Art Institute of Chicago and played with the Chicago Youth Symphony. Īnderson was born in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, on June 5, 1947, the daughter of Mary Louise (née Rowland) and Arthur T. Īnderson met singer-songwriter Lou Reed in 1992, and she was married to him from April 2008 until his death in 2013. In the late 1990s, she collaborated with Interval Research to develop an instrument she called a 'talking stick,' a six-foot (1.8 m) long baton-like MIDI controller that can access and replicate sounds. In 1977, she created a tape-bow violin that uses recorded magnetic tape on the bow instead of horsehair and a magnetic tape head in the bridge. Īnderson is a pioneer in electronic music and has invented several devices that she has used in her recordings and performance art shows. She also starred in and directed the 1986 concert film Home of the Brave. Her debut album Big Science was released the following year. She became more widely known outside the art world when her single ' O Superman' reached number two on the UK singles chart in 1981. Initially trained in violin and sculpting, Anderson pursued a variety of performance art projects in New York during the 1970s, focusing particularly on language, technology, and visual imagery. Laura Phillips Anderson (born June 5, 1947), known as Laurie Anderson, is an American avant-garde artist, composer, musician, and film director whose work spans performance art, pop music, and multimedia projects.

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