Lisa E. Harris, Li, is an interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker, creative soprano, performer/composer, improviser, writer, singer/songwriter, researcher, and cultural producer from Houston, Texas. During Li’s ArtLab residency, she taught the course “Sound Mind and Body: Achieving Spiritual Harmony in an Out of Tune World” in the Harvard Music Department, culminating in a performance of student final projects at the ArtLab.
Li’s work resists genre classification as she considers the energetic relationships between body, land, spirit, and place. She is the founder and creative director of Studio Enertia; a North American-based socially engaged arts collective and production company. She recently completed her ten-year durational work, “Cry of the Third Eye, a new opera film in Three Acts.” Li is the 2021 recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts’ Dorothea Tanning Award for Music/Sound, a 2021 Jazz Road Creative Residency Awardee, and the inaugural Brown Foundation Houston Affiliate Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. Li is a Monroe Research Fellow at Tulane University’s Center for the Gulf South.
While at ArtLab, Li developed research for an ongoing performance project addressing environmental justice entitled “Onshore Trilling: What to Do When The Earth Sings The Bruise.” Li also continued the development of her new performance project, “D.R.E.A.M.= A-Way-to-AFRAM,” commissioned by the National Performance Network. D.R.E.A.M.= A-Way-to-AFRAM is the basis of a future collaboration with Alisha B. Wormsley. The artists were awarded Guggenheim Fellowships in Fine Arts in 2022.
A Black Women Told Me and I Believe Her: A Movement Still Moving Performance at ArtLab in November 2021. Composed by Li Harris.
Student Performance: Recasting the American Dream
ArtLab Podcast: Works in Progress Ep 3 featuring: Claire Chase, flutist, and Harvard professor with Lisa E. Harris, opera singer, and composer
Photo Credit: Sonia Malfa