Lisa E. Harris
peopleLisa E. Harris, Li, is an independent and interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker, creative soprano, performer, composer, improvisor, writer, singer/songwriter and educator from Houston Texas. Recognized by Huffington Post as “one of fourteen artist 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 is the producer of 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. Li can be heard on her much anticipated release EarthSeed a live performance album based on the writings of Octavia Butler, composed by Lisa E Harris and Nicole Mitchell on FPE records.
Recent engagements include The Force of Things- an Opera for Objects by Ashley Fure, The Nubian Word for Flowers- a phantom Opera by Pauline Oliveros and IONE, and Earthseed, a co-composition commission with Nicole M. Mitchell for Chicago's Art Institute. Recent public installations include House of Practice, an alternative health and recreational center for deep listening and self-divination, which was on view at Project Row Houses, Round 48: Beyond Social Practice, curated by Ryan Dennis Taylor. Forthcoming publications include Black Women As/And the Living Archive an exhibition book with curators Alisha B. Wormsley, Tsedaye Makonnen and Washington Project for the Arts.
She is a current Monroe Research Fellow at Tulane University's Center for the Gulf South where she is developing her environmental justice research project Onshore Trilling: What to Do When the Earth Sings the Bruise.
Recent engagements include The Force of Things- an Opera for Objects by Ashley Fure, The Nubian Word for Flowers- a phantom Opera by Pauline Oliveros and IONE, and Earthseed, a co-composition commission with Nicole M. Mitchell for Chicago's Art Institute. Recent public installations include House of Practice, an alternative health and recreational center for deep listening and self-divination, which was on view at Project Row Houses, Round 48: Beyond Social Practice, curated by Ryan Dennis Taylor. Forthcoming publications include Black Women As/And the Living Archive an exhibition book with curators Alisha B. Wormsley, Tsedaye Makonnen and Washington Project for the Arts.
She is a current Monroe Research Fellow at Tulane University's Center for the Gulf South where she is developing her environmental justice research project Onshore Trilling: What to Do When the Earth Sings the Bruise.
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