Laurie Anderson

Laurie Anderson is an American avant-garde performance artist, composer, and storyteller whose hybrid work fuses spoken-word narrative, electronic music, and visual installation. Born June 5, 1947, in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, she trained as a sculptor at Barnard College and Columbia University before turning to performance in the early 1970s, building handmade instruments and inventing the tape-bow violin to amplify her experiments.

Her unexpected commercial breakthrough came in 1981 when an eight-minute piece, O Superman, climbed to number two on the UK singles chart on the strength of its hypnotic vocoder loop and Cold-War unease. The track anchored her debut album Big Science and prefigured the ambitious touring stage work United States I-IV, a multi-evening meditation on American culture.

Anderson released steadily through the 1980s and 1990s on Warner Bros., including Mister Heartbreak, Strange Angels, and the soundtrack album Home of the Brave. In 2002 NASA appointed her its first artist-in-residence, a role that produced the touring monologue The End of the Moon.

Her 2015 documentary Heart of a Dog, an elegy for her terrier Lolabelle and her late husband Lou Reed, was shortlisted for an Academy Award. She has since continued to push into virtual reality with Chalkroom and into orchestral writing with Landfall, recorded with the Kronos Quartet and awarded a 2018 Grammy.

The name Laurie is an English diminutive of Laura, drawn from the Latin laurus, meaning laurel, the evergreen wreath that crowned Roman victors and poets. Once nearly even between sexes, it is now used predominantly for girls, and she carries its quiet, garlanded sense of distinction.