Photo by Brittany Sprague

 

About

Lisa Erdman (U.S.A)  is an artist, educator, and researcher. Through satire and corporate parody, Lisa's multimedia work explores the mechanisms that shape personal identity and one’s relationship to medical authority.

Her work borrows from traditions of conceptual art, speculative design, improvisation, and interventionist performative strategies. Lisa has served as a professor of art and design, as a graphic designer of pharmaceutical advertising, and an instructional designer. In her most recent role as a postdoctoral scholar at Penn State College of Medicine, Lisa facilitated the core humanities courses for first-year medical students and she conducted arts-based health research in clinical communication.

Since 1992, Lisa’s videos, installations, and performances have been presented internationally in venues such as: The Kitchen Performance Space in New York City; Kiasma Contemporary Art Museum; The Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki, Finland; SIGGRAPH Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques in Boston; The Houston International Film Festival; and the Cine Estudiantil Latino Film Festival in Enseñada, Mexico. Lisa has participated in residencies at the Red Gate Gallery in Beijing, China, the Hungarian Multicultural Center in Budapest, and the Centre for Health Education Scholarship at the University British Columbia, Canada.

Lisa’s research and art productions have received numerous awards, including funding from the Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation (Finland), the Arts Council of Finland, and the Emil Aaltonen Foundation (Finland). Lisa received a grant award from the Washington D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities, for her poem entitled, Café con Léche which explores her Dominican-American identity. The poem was included in an exhibition of Latin American art and writing entitled, Our Voices, Our Images at the Inter-American Development Bank and Cultural Center in Washington D.C.

Lisa holds a Doctorate of Arts from Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland. She earned a Master of Fine Arts in Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY, and a Bachelor of Science in Dance, Interarts & Technology from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Lisa currently resides in the greater Harrisburg area of Pennsylvania.