The Church’s Summer Dinner Theater benefit returns on Saturday, June 7. This year it will welcome the interdisciplinary artist and iconic performer Laurie Anderson to the stage. A true Renaissance woman, the five-time Grammy-nominated musician, award-winning writer, director and visual artist will treat the audience to an evening of stories and songs. The evening will begin with cocktails at 5:30 p.m., followed by dinner and remarks at 6:30 p.m. and showtime at 8 p.m.
Laurie Anderson is a writer, director, composer, visual artist, musician and vocalist who has created groundbreaking works that span the worlds of art, theater, experimental music, and technology. Her recording career was launched by “O Superman” in 1981.
Anderson’s live shows range from simple spoken word to expansive multimedia stage performances such as the eight-hour “United States” (1982), “Empty Places:” (1990), “Songs and Stories From Moby Dick” (1999), and “Delusion” (2010). In 2002, Anderson was appointed the first artist-in-residence of NASA which culminated in her 2004 touring solo performance “The End of the Moon.”
Anderson has created numerous audio-visual installations as well as films — the feature film “Home of the Brave” (1986), “Carmen” (1992) and “Hidden Inside Mountains” (2005) and “Heart of a Dog” (2015) which was chosen as an official selection of the 2015 Venice and Toronto Film Festivals.
In the same year, her exhibition “Habeas Corpus” opened at the Park Avenue Armory to wide critical acclaim and in 2016 she was the recipient of Yoko Ono’s Courage Award for the Arts for that project.
As a performer and musician, she has collaborated with many people including Brian Eno, Jean-Michel Jarre, William S. Burroughs, Peter Gabriel, Robert Wilson, Christian McBride and Philip Glass. Her works for quartets and orchestras, “Songs for Amelia” (2001), has been played in festivals and concert halls around the world and she has invented a series of instruments and electronic sculptures.
Anderson has published 10 books and been nominated for five Grammys. She released “Landfall,” a collaboration with the Kronos Quartet, which received a Grammy award in 2018.
As a composer, Anderson has contributed music to films by Wim Wenders and Jonathan Demme, dance pieces by Bill T. Jones, Trisha Brown, Molissa Fenley, and scores for theater productions including plays by Robert LePage. She has created pieces for National Public Radio, France Culture and the BBC. She has curated several large festivals including the Vivid Festival in Sydney (2010) and the Meltdown Festival at Royal Festival Hall in London (1997).
In 2003, the Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon in France produced a touring retrospective of her work entitled “The Record of the Time: Sound in the Work of Laurie Anderson.” In 2010 a retrospective of her visual and installation work opened in São Paulo, Brazil and later traveled to Rio de Janeiro. Anderson’s largest solo exhibition at The Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., titled “The Weather” (2021-2022), showcased the artist’s storytelling process through her work in video, performance, installation, painting, and other media.
Her visual work is on long-term display at MASS MoCA and her three virtual reality works, “Chalkroom,” “Aloft” and “To the Moon,” collaborations with the artist Hsin-Chien Huang, won several awards including Best VR Experience at the 74th Venice International Film Festival in 2017 and were featured in the Cannes Film Festival in 2019.
A retrospective of her work opened in 2023 at Moderna Museet in Stockholm. She has received numerous honorary doctorates, prizes and awards including the Guggenheim Fellowship, Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize and the Wolf Prize. In 2024 she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Recording Academy at the 66th Grammy Awards, the Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication at the Starmus VII Festival, and the Gold Medal for Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
In 2021 she served as Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University and delivered the Norton lectures as video, now available online. She has worked on numerous projects in AI with the Machine Learning Institute in Adelaide, Australia where she was artist in residence in 2020. Anderson recently debuted her latest show, “Ark,” commissioned by the Manchester International Festival, in late 2024.
Her life partner as well as her collaborator was Lou Reed from 1992 onward. They married in 2008 and worked on numerous projects together until his death in 2013. Anderson lives in New York City.
All proceeds from this event benefit The Church’s year-round exhibitions, programming and artist residency. Tickets for the event start at $650 per person. Visit thechurchsagharbor.org for details. The Church is at 48 Madison Street in Sag Harbor.
Staff Writer on May 26, 2025