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

Laura Lea Nalle is a multidisciplinary artist from Austin, Texas.  She draws on a wide range of materials and processes and loves using mixed media and found objects in her work because it makes her look at relationships between things in the world in new and unexpected ways. She loves the tension and interplay between the minimal, clean surfaces of industrial materials and outworn, decayed items she finds throughout her extensive travels.  She has piles of boxes in her studio with sundry collected items she pulls from as she works. Her favorite boxes are the ones labeled “rust,” “rocks,” “burned," and "feathers.”  While her fine art pieces run the gamut in terms of mediums and processes, there is a coherent conceptual thread evident in her line of inquiry.  Laura Lea's work always implicates the viewer, whether through an overt act of participation or through more subtle means such as reflections and shadows cast onto the surface of the work.

Laura Lea has been a freelance photographer for more than a decade, specializing in live music, portrait, and documentary photography. She is the editor of AustinLiveMusic.Org which is a long term documentary project about Austin's vibrant world of live music.  In addition to extraordinary live music photos, she writes reviews and conducts interviews of the artists and musicians she photographs.  Her coverage goes beyond mere reporting and aims at bringing the audience a unique and substantial experience of the artists she follows.  LL's live music photos have been published in numerous issues of SXSWorld, including the cover of the highly coveted March 2010 music issue.  Photography, including a range of traditional and alternative photographic processes, also plays a central role in her fine art and mixed media work because she thinks it provides an important foundation and point of reference for work which often drifts into more philosophical and visually abstract realms.

Laura Lea enjoys filming and editing performances and events, particularly behind the scenes of music videos and recording sessions.  She 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. Her clientele includes an impressive list of acclaimed musicians, artists, producers, public figures, events, and businesses. 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.

Starting in 2008 and continuing into the present, Laura Lea helps produce, manage, and curate the annual art festival, Art Outside, and sees her involvement with the event as an extension of her own fine art work.  She enjoys collaborating with the close-knit production team and extensive community of artists to create elaborate environments for thousands of people to experience.  LL always looks forward to the spontaneous acts of expression and participation that occur in such unique spaces and loves seeing how such experiences bring greater meaning and beauty into peoples lives.  In addition to event production, LL also works on the production and management end of things in the art and music worlds in Austin and beyond.

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 has a masters degree in philosophy with a specialty in philosophy of art from Texas State University. 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.

In addition to art, Laura Lea maintains a rigorous Ashtanga yoga practice, is an avid runner in training for her first marathon, and enjoys the delectable alchemy of raw vegan 'cooking'.  She lives in Austin, Texas when she is not traveling somewhere else in the world.

LL's deep Texas roots....