51 Facts About Laurie Anderson

Laura Phillips "Laurie" Anderson was born on June 5,1947 and is an American avant-garde artist, musician and filmmaker whose work encompasses performance art, pop music, and multimedia projects.

Laurie Anderson achieved unexpected commercial success when her song "O Superman" reached number two on the UK singles chart in 1981.

Laurie Anderson starred in and directed the 1986 concert film Home of the Brave.

Laurie Anderson is a pioneer in electronic music and has invented several musical devices that she has used in her recordings and performance art shows.

Laura Phillips Anderson was born in Chicago on June 5,1947, and grew up in the nearby suburb Glen Ellyn, Illinois, one of eight children born to Mary Louise and Arthur T Anderson.

Laurie Anderson recorded a lecture for Vision, a set of artist's lectures released by Crown Point Press as a set of six LPs.

Laurie Anderson worked with comedian Andy Kaufman in the late 1970s.

In 1980, Laurie Anderson was awarded an honorary doctorate from the San Francisco Art Institute.

In 1987, Laurie Anderson was awarded an honorary doctorate in the fine arts from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.

The sudden influx of orders from the UK led to Laurie Anderson signing a seven-album deal with Warner Bros.

Laurie Anderson appeared in a television special produced by Nam June Paik broadcast on New Year's Day 1984, titled "Good Morning, Mr Orwell".

Laurie Anderson next starred in and directed the 1986 concert film Home of the Brave and composed the soundtracks for the Spalding Gray films Swimming to Cambodia and Monster in a Box.

Laurie Anderson was the presenter in this documentary on the history of the face in art and science.

Laurie Anderson's face was transformed using latex masks and digital special effects as she introduced ideas about the relationship between physiognomy and perception.

In 1996, Laurie Anderson performed with Diego Frenkel and Aterciopelados for the AIDS benefit album Silencio=Muerte: Red Hot + Latin produced by the Red Hot Organization.

One of the central themes in Laurie Anderson's work is exploring the effects of technology on human relationships and communication.

Laurie Anderson went on tour performing a selection of her best-known musical pieces in 2001.

In 2003, Laurie Anderson produced albums with French musicians La Jarry and Hector Zazou and performed with them.

Laurie Anderson became NASA's first artist-in-residence in the same year, which inspired her performance piece The End of the Moon.

Laurie Anderson mounted a succession of themed shows and composed a piece for Expo 2005 in Japan.

In 2006, Laurie Anderson was awarded a Residency at the American Academy in Rome.

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

Laurie Anderson contributed a song to Plague Songs, a collection of songs related to the 10 Biblical plagues.

In February 2010, Laurie Anderson premiered a new theatrical work, titled Delusion, at the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Games.

Laurie Anderson was honored with the Women's Project Theater Woman of Achievement Award in March 2010.

Laurie Anderson performed "Only an Expert" on July 15,2010, on the Late Show with David Letterman, and her song "Gravity's Angel" was featured on the Fox TV show So You Think You Can Dance the same day.

Laurie Anderson appears as a guest musician on several tracks from experimental jazz musician Colin Stetson's 2011 album New History Warfare Vol.

Laurie Anderson developed a theatrical work titled "Another Day in America".

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

Laurie Anderson performed her Duets on Ice outside the Samstag on opening night.

Laurie Anderson received the Honorary Doctor of Arts from the Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture in 2013.

In 2018, Laurie Anderson contributed vocals to a re-recording of the David Bowie song "Shining Star ", originally from Bowie's 1987 album Never Let Me Down.

Laurie Anderson was asked to join the production by producer Mario J McNulty, who knew that Anderson and Bowie had been friends.

Laurie 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.

In 2021, Laurie Anderson created a show on the second floor of the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC, titled "The Weather" and described by The New York Times as "a sort of nonretrospective retrospective of one of America's major, and majorly confounding, modern artists".

In mid-2023, Laurie Anderson created "Looking into a Mirror Sideways", an exhibit that highlights various different styles of her art techniques.

Sexmob and Laurie Anderson toured Europe where they performed multiple versions of her songs, but adding a twist to them all.

In 2024, Laurie Anderson withdrew from a guest professorship at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen, after university officials objected to her support of a "Letter Against Apartheid" organised by Palestinian artists, calling for "an immediate and unconditional cessation of Israeli violence against Palestinians".

In November 2024 Laurie Anderson staged United States V, a multimedia performance envisioned as a sequel to United States.

Laurie Anderson is a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music.

Laurie Anderson has invented several experimental musical instruments that she has used in her recordings and performances.

Laurie Anderson has updated and modified this device over the years.

Laurie Anderson 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.

Laurie Anderson has long used the resulting character in her work as a "voice of authority" or conscience, although she later decided that the voice had lost much of its authority and instead began using the voice to provide historical or sociopolitical commentary, as it is used on "Another Day in America", a piece from her 2010 album Homeland.

In "The Cultural Ambassador", a piece on her album The Ugly One with the Jewels, Laurie Anderson explained some of her perspective on the character:.

Laurie Anderson moved to New York in 1966 and now lives in Tribeca.

Laurie Anderson met singer-songwriter Lou Reed in 1992, and was married to him from April 2008 until his death in 2013.

Laurie Anderson first learned meditation on a retreat with the Insight Meditation Society in 1977.

Laurie Anderson has since become a student of Tibetan Buddhist teacher Mingyur Rinpoche.

Laurie Anderson recorded a number of limited-release singles in the late 1970s, songs from which were included on a number of compilations, including Giorno Poetry Systems' The Nova Convention and You're the Guy I Want to Share My Money With.

Laurie Anderson contributed lyrics to the Philip Glass album Songs from Liquid Days, and contributed a spoken-word piece to a tribute album in honor of John Cage.