Laura Nova
Artist, Athlete, Activator: Long-time Lower East Side resident Laura Nova generates site-specific, action-oriented projects which invite participatory energies of neighbors and strangers alike, particularly within the urban landscapes of older adult and migrant communities. She uses cardio, comedy and cooking to create activ/ist audiences who, in turn, reveal and preserve stories of both people and places.
Laura Nova is a multidisciplinary artist working in sculpture, photo, video, sound, performance and installation. Her varied projects include a 64’ billboard of an order by number menu, a 20-meter indoor running track, an automated praise-singing machine and a karaoke style stage for one-liner jokes. Nova provides expansive tools to collaborate with communities that are often underserved and overlooked by mainstream media. Exercising storytelling, subjective and collective memory and the body – her latest work pulls all of these elements together. Viewers become part of her installations, as participation merges into performance and edges into everyday life.
Recent commissions have included multi-year, social engagement projects like "Feed Me A Story," (co-produced with Theresa Loong) an interactive video installation and documentary video cookbook of secret family recipes and “The Crescendo Project” which used RFID technology to create an automated praise-singing machine for disabled athletes during a road race. In tandem with Dances For A Variable Population, she transformed residents and dancers alike into a moving company for the River to River Festival’s "LES Citizens Parade." Nova's work has been shown at the New Museum, the Museum at Eldridge Street, the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of the Moving Image, Real Art Ways and many galleries including the Substation Gallery in Johannesburg, South Africa and the National Arts Center in Tokyo, Japan. She has received grants from the MAP Fund, National Endowment of the Arts, New York State Council of the Arts, PBS/POV and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. She has been published in DNAinfo, New York Magazine, Hyperallergic and WNYC. Her residencies include SPARC (Seniors Partnering with Artists Citywide), the Statue of Liberty & Ellis Island National Monument, Governors Island, Center for Book Arts, Marble House Project, Vermont Studio Center and LMCC Workspace. Nova received a B.F.A. and B.A. from Cornell University and an M.F.A. from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is currently an Associate Professor of Expanded Media in the Creative Art and Technology program at Bloomfield College and the 2016 recipient of the LMCC President’s Award in Visual Art.