A furniture hoist strap encircles Laurie’s waist, lifting and guiding her through this interpretation of the waltz from the ballet “The Sleeping Beauty.” The stage and setting is the parking lot behind the Electron Movers studio, Providence, Rhode Island; the hoist is operated from the fifth floor of the former Fain Carpet Building (c. 1890) at 128 North Main Street. Music by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.
Assisted by Alan Powell and Dennis Hlynsky.
Laurie McDonald is a media artist, writer, graphic designer, and photographer. In 1972, she began exploring video as an art-making tool and was a founding member of the video art collective Electron Movers, Research in the Electronic Arts, based in Providence, Rhode Island. Her early work was exhibited at The Kitchen (NYC) and included in the 10th, 11th, and 12th annual New York Avant Garde Festivals, and at venues throughout New York and New England.
She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist Fellowship and four American Film Institute/NEA Fellowships. Her work has been exhibited internationally at venues including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Pierre du Chardin Gallery (Paris), The Gallery of Modern Art (Rome), and at festivals including the American Film Institute’s Film/Video Festival, the Tokyo Video Festival, the Festival du Cinema in Montreal, and at Filmfest (Berlin, Budapest, Hong Kong, Melbourne, Moscow).
As a writer, her experience ranges from novels to screenplays to instructional/informational writing. Using the pseudonym Eva Rome, she has written and published three books: Travel for STOICS; What It Means: Myth, Symbol, and Archetype in the Third Millennium, Vol. 1; and Location X: A Quest for Place. She has served as a screenplay consultant to the National Endowment for the Arts Media Grants Committee, as a contract screenplay and script writer/consultant, and as both a book editor and book cover designer. As a graphic designer and photographer, she has designed and built Web sites, graphics for print, and graphics for video. She has published two books of her own photographs: Chair, and Fotocollées.
Laurie is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design and holds a Master of Literature degree from the University of Houston. She lives in Evanston, Illinois, USA, and in San Miguel de Allende, México.