"I'm from Texas, so I get two first names."

Laura Lea Nalle is a mixed media installation artist drawing on a wide range of materials and processes. She loves using found objects in her work because it makes her look at things in the world in new and unexpected ways. She loves old and decayed materials and has piles of boxes with sundry collected items she pulls from as she works. Her favorite boxes are the ones labeled “rust,” “rocks,” and “broken glass.”

Laura Lea has been a freelance photographer for more than a decade, specializing in live music, portrait, and documentary photography. She recently started writing reviews and conducting interviews of the artists and musicians she photographs. Photography also plays a central role in her fine art and mixed media work because she thinks it provides an important grounding and point of reference for work which often drifts into more ethereal realms.

Laura Lea designs and screenprints t-shirts and posters and thinks affordable, wearable art is a great way to infiltrate the world with her images and ideas. She works from home in her fully equipped photography studio, printmaking shop, and mixed media art studio.

Laura Lea and her installation, the Greenhouse Project, were featured in a documentary vignette series that explores the intersection of art and green activism at Burning Man 2007. The documentary was directed by M. Sean Kaminsky of Organik Media and aired in regular rotation on the Sundance Channel throughout 2008. She and the Greenhouse also appear in the feature-length documentary, Green Man, by the acclaimed French filmmaker Patrick Morrell.

Laura Lea helped produce, manage, curate, and book the 4th annual Art Outside in 2008 and continues to work on the production and management end of things in the art and music worlds. She was tour manager for the Guy Forsyth Band’s summer tour throughout the east coast, midwest, and Canada in 2008 and continues to work with Guy's management team in a number of capacities.

Laura Lea was born and raised in Austin into a family with a long and colorful history there, so her proclivity for bohemian and progressive thinking runs deep. She exhibited artistic talent from a very early age and went on to study formally at Idyllwild Arts Academy and Pratt Institute. Laura Lea is currently finishing a masters degree in philosophy at Texas A&M with a specialty in philosophy of art. She conducted her thesis research at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, and her philosophical writing explores the significance of viewer interaction and participation in aesthetic experience.

LL's deep Texas roots....