Recipient Information
Location
Houston, Texas
Year of Award
2021
Grant or Fellowship
Jazz Road Creative Residencies Grant
Grant Amount
$40,000
About the Project
With partner Ballroom Marfa, this residency is focused on the society culture of segrated Dallas, TX, and will allow for creation of a sonic and visual expression of the Dream Album with the ensemble.
Residency location
Dallas, TX
About the Artist
Lisa E. Harris, Li, is an independent and interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker, creative soprano, performer, composer, improvisor, writer and and researcher from Houston, Texas. Li is the 2021 recipient of the Dorothea Tanning Award for Music/ Sound, awarded by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and a 2021 Texas Vignette Artist Grant winner.
Recognized by Huffington Post as “one of fourteen artists transforming Opera '', Li's work resists genre classification as she focuses on the energetic relationships between body, land, spirit and place. Using voice, theremin, photography, movement, improvisation, meditation, and new media to explore spatial awareness,substantivalism, relationalism, intuition, panoptic surveillance, sonification and personification, Li maintains a focused concentration on healing in performance and living. She is the founder and creative director of Studio Enertia, an arts collective and production company in Houston Texas. Studio Enertia produced Harris’s recently completed 10 year durational work, “Cry of the Third Eye, a new opera film in Three Acts” that archives the effects of gentrification on her Houston neighborhood. Li recently created and curated Houston’s inaugural Free Time Flow Festival at MacGregor Park, celebrating the intersections of basketball, electro-acoustic music and improvisational performance.She is responsible for instating and curating Pauline Oliveros Day at Discovery Green Houston. ‘Proof’, a multi-layered retrospective body of work created with long-term collaborator Alisha B. Wormsley( There Are Black People in The Future), was first exhibited at Art League Houston in 2013 and later at Studio XX’s HTMLLES Festival in Montreal Quebec, where Harris and Wormsley(Studio Enertia) were Artist in Residence in 2014.
Harris co-composed EarthSeed with Nicole Mitchell, a live performance album based on the writings of Octavia Butler, released last year on FPE Records. She can often be seen and heard as the lead singer with Jason Moran's Fats Waller Dance Party and is featured on his Blue Note recording All Rise with Meshell N’degeocello.
Li has performed at the Montreux Jazz Festival, Monterey Jazz Festival, Newport Jazz Festival, the Kennedy Center, Paris Jazz Festival, Big Ears Festival, Chicago Jazz Festival, Sarajevo Jazz Festival, Montreal Jazz Festival, Moogfest, Marfa Myths, Red Bull Round Robin Chicago,Lincoln Center, Houston Grand Opera, Norwegian Academy of Music, Venice Biennale, and the MoMA.