*POSTPONED* Push limits with Laurie Anderson, Rosanne Cash, and A. M. Homes at SCAD deFINE ART
This event has been postponed, check back for more details.
Hear from three titans of creativity in this master class roundtable featuring lauded avant-garde artist and SCAD deFINE ART 2026 honoree Laurie Anderson, celebrated singer-songwriter Rosanne Cash, and bestselling author A. M. Homes. Gain insight into the challenges and rewards of a life in the arts during this wide-ranging conversation on the creative process and building a career through experimentation and risk taking.
This event is free and open to the public and presented as part of SCAD deFINE ART 2026.
About the artists
Laurie Anderson (b. 1947, Glen Ellyn, Ill.; lives and works in New York) 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, including Home of the Brave (1986), Carmen (1992), and Hidden Inside Mountains (2005). Her film Heart of a Dog (2015) 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, Anderson has collaborated with Brian Eno, Jean-Michel Jarre, William S. Burroughs, Peter Gabriel, Robert Wilson, Christian McBride, and Philip Glass. Her works for quartets and orchestras, such as Songs for Amelia (2001), have 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 Grammy Awards throughout her recording career with Warner Records and Nonesuch. She released Landfall, a collaboration with the Kronos Quartet that 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, and Molissa Fenley; and theater productions including plays by Robert Lepage. She has created works for National Public Radio, France Culture, and the BBC. Anderson has also curated several large festivals including Vivid Sydney (2010) and Meltdown at Royal Festival Hall in London (1997).
Anderson’s visual work has been featured in many galleries and museums. In 2003, the Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon in France produced a touring retrospective of her work titled 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 (2021–22), 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 the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. Anderson’s three virtual reality works — Chalkroom, Aloft, and To the Moon, collaborations with the artist Hsin-Chien Huang — have 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.
Anderson 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 Australian Institute for Machine Learning, where she was an artist in residence in 2020. Anderson recently debuted her latest show, ARK: United States Part V, commissioned by the Manchester International Festival, in late 2024.
Anderson’s 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.
Named “one of the most ambitious and literary songwriters of her generation” by Rolling Stone magazine, Rosanne Cash is America’s foremost musical woman of letters, a literate and incisive artist whose poignant and distinctive vocals turn every song into a revelatory tale. A singular artist at the peak of her interpretive powers, Cash has earned four Grammy Awards — three for The River & The Thread (2014, Blue Note) — and 12 additional nominations. Among many other accolades, she became the first woman to receive the Edward MacDowell Medal for music composition in 2021. Her acclaimed 2010 memoir Composed has been described by the Chicago Tribune as “one of the best accounts of an American life you’ll likely ever read.” Cash was recently elected as an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
“I consider artists to be in the service industry — the premier service industry for the heart and soul. I am curious to a pathological degree and the Sword of Time hangs over me, and those two things — curiosity and the hourglass — make me feel more urgent than ever to connect, to find community, and to create. It doesn’t matter what the world thinks, it only matters that what is unsaid and what is unseen is given form and has a voice.”
In 2023 Cash and her husband John Leventhal, the six-time Grammy Award-winning songwriter, producer, and her lifelong creative partner, launched RumbleStrip Records, an initiative to reexamine and reissue Cash’s early work, originally released on Columbia/Sony Music and beyond. The first two releases were a deluxe remastered version and first vinyl pressing, respectively, of Cash’s landmark album The Wheel and Leventhal’s debut solo album Rumble Strip (2024), released 50 years into his remarkable career. In 2025 they released The Essential Collection, a new 40-song/40-year double CD compilation highlighting Cash’s deep catalog of songs including 10 no. 1 hits. The album coincided with the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum exhibition Rosanne Cash: Time Is a Mirror. The exhibition explored Cash’s more than 40-year journey as an artist, songwriter, and storyteller and how she has embodied both tradition and innovation across her musical career. It runs through March 2026. Cash and Leventhal also wrote the music for the theatrical production Norma Rae.
A. M. Homes released her most recent book The Unfolding in 2022. Her previous work includes This Book Will Save Your Life, which won the 2013 Orange/Women’s Prize for Fiction; Music for Torching; The End of Alice; In a Country of Mothers; and Jack. She is also the author of the short-story collections Days of Awe, Things You Should Know, and The Safety of Objects, as well as the bestselling memoir The Mistress’s Daughter, the travel memoir Los Angeles: People, Places, and the Castle on the Hill, and the artist’s book Appendix A:.
Her work has been translated into 22 languages and appears frequently in Artforum, Harper’s Magazine, Granta, McSweeney’s, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Zoetrope. She is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, BOMB, and Blind Spot Magazine. Several times a year she collaborates on book projects with artists including Eric Fischl, Rachel Whiteread, Cecily Brown, Bill Owens, Julie Speed, Michal Chelbin, Petah Coyne, Carroll Dunham, Catherine Opie, and Todd Hido.
She was a co-executive producer and writer on David E. Kelley and Stephen King’s Mr. Mercedes and co-executive producer and writer on Falling Water. She has also created original television pilots for HBO, FX, and CBS and was a writer/producer of the Showtime series The L Word. Additionally, she wrote the adaptation of her first novel Jack for Showtime. Director Rose Troche’s 2003 adaptation of The Safety of Objects marks the screen debut of Kristen Stewart. Other Homes novels currently in development for the screen include This Book Will Save Your Life and May We Be Forgiven. Homes is also currently developing a new television project with BBC America.
Homes is the recipient of numerous awards including fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, as well as the Benjamin Franklin Award and the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis.
Homes has been active as co-chair of the board of directors of Yaddo and serves on the Writers Guild of America East Council as well as on the board of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Mass.; the Writers Room in New York, and PEN, where she chaired both the membership committee and the Writers Fund. Additionally, she serves on the board of Poets & Writers. Homes was born in Washington, D.C., lives in New York, and teaches in the creative writing program at Princeton University.