Oxy Live! Laurie Anderson in Conversation with Paul Holdengräber (4/10/2024)

Laurie Anderson 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.

Anderson’s recording career was launched by “O Superman” in 1981. Her 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 had created numerous audio-visual installations as well as films, including the feature films 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.

As a performer and musician, she has collaborated with many people including Brian Eno, Jean-Michel Jarre, William S. Burroughs, Peter Gabriel, Robert Wilson, Christian McBride and Philip Glass. Her works for quartets and orchestras, Songs for Amelia (2001), has been played in festivals and concert halls around the world and she has invented a series of instruments and electronic sculptures.

Anderson has published ten books and been nominated for five Grammys throughout her recording career with Warner Records and Nonesuch. She released Landfall, a collaboration with the Kronos Quartet, which 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, Molissa Fenley, and scores for theater productions including plays by Robert LePage. She has created pieces for National Public Radio, France Culture and the BBC. She has curated several large festivals including the Vivid Festival in Sydney (2010) and the Meltdown Festival at Royal Festival Hall in London (1997).

Her visual work has been featured in many galleries and museums including in 2003, the Musée d'art contemporain de Lyon in France produced a touring retrospective of her work entitled 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 (2021-2022), 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 MASS MoCA and her three virtual reality works, Chalkroom, Aloft, and To The Moon, collaborations with the artist Hsin-Chien Huang, 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.


She has received numerous honorary doctorates, prizes and awards including the Guggenheim Fellowship, Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, and the Wolf Prize.

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 Machine Learning Institute in Adelaide, Australia, where she was artist in residence in 2020. Anderson continues to tour her evolving performance The Art of Falling and is working on an opera, ARK, commissioned by the Manchester International Festival, premiering in 2024.

Paul Holdengräber is an interviewer and curator. He was the founding executive director of Onassis Los Angeles (OLA). Previously, and for 14 years, he was founder and director of The New York Public Library’s LIVE from the NYPL cultural series where he interviewed and hosted over 600 events, holding conversations with everyone from Patti Smith to Zadie Smith, Ricky Jay to Jay-Z, Errol Morris to Jan Morris, Wes Anderson to Helen Mirren, Werner Herzog to Mike Tyson. Before his tenure at the Library, Holdengräber was the founder and director of “The Institute for Art & Cultures” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and a Fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. He has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and has taught at Princeton University, Williams College, Claremont Graduate University among others. In 2003, the French Government named Holdengräber Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, and then promoted him in 2012 to the rank of Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres. In 2010, The President of Austria awarded him the Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art.