We're excited to share and congratulate Penn Music lecturer, Qiujiang Levi Lu, who has recently been selected to join the ISSUE Project Room as an Artist-In-Residence for 2025 season.
From ISSUE Project Room:
Founded by Suzanne Fiol, since 2006, ISSUE’s Artist-in-Residence series has served a central role in fulfilling ISSUE’s mission to support artists in the local community. The program encourages selected NYC-based artists to take unprecedented creative risks in reaching the next stage in their artistic development, providing residents with a stipend plus production, marketing and curatorial support to create and present up to three new works over the course of a year.
Qiujiang Levi Lu (卢秋江) is a NYC-based performance artist, improviser, composer, and educator. Their work transforms the body into a sonic object through interactions with movements and audio technology exploring identity, sound, and space. Lu designs customized feedback systems with cyborg-like body augmentations inspired by Objectophilia/animism. These include special microphones, speakers placed within bodily orifices, and an augmented amplified laptop. Their resulting performances consist of choreographed, ritualistic improvisations building upon ancient Chinese drumming traditions to manifest body dysmorphia, sexuality, spirituality, and mortality. Lu is the second-prize winner of The International Electronic Music Competition 2023. Their works have been featured at international festivals and venues such as MATA Festival, High Zero Festival, IRCAM Forum, SEAMUS conference, E-Flux, and NIME conference. Lu has also been an artist-in-residence at Elektronmusikstudion EMS Stockholm SE. Lu is currently a lecturer in the Department of Music at the University of Pennsylvania.
About ISSUE Project Room
ISSUE Project Room plays a vital role in NYC’s cultural ecology, facilitating the commission and premiere of new works and presenting a diverse array of artists working across sound, movement, film, performance and literature. Programming aims to bring recognition to artists whose important contributions fall beyond infrastructural boundaries of discipline or genre, elude audience expectations, or are otherwise underrepresented as a result of bias within the fields of art and performance, and broader histories of social and economic participation. Through the cultivation of innovative new work, ISSUE performs an essential research and development function that fosters a dynamic influx of ideas into the local, national, and international creative landscape.