Laia
April 2019
Laia is a multimedia artist, working across installation, image, live and immersive performance, emerging media, poetry, and prose. Laia’s practice aims to bring insights from contemporary science into useable, playful, divine, and mythic places in everyday life.
Laia is an artist-in-residence in the brown dwarf astrophysics group at the American Museum of Natural History; 2021-2022 Pew Foundation grantee through the Academy of Natural Sciences; 2021-2022 Collider fellow at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts; 2021 NYFA Fellow in Fiction; and member of the Guild of Future Architects.
Additionally, Laia’s work has been presented and/or commissioned by over 160 venues across North America and Europe including the Public Theater, Red Bull Arts, High Line, and Metropolitan Museum of Art. They have been an innovator-in-residence at Colorado College; artist-in-residence at Brooklyn College; artist-in-residence at the University of Colorado; Hemispheric Institute Fellow at NYU; Sundance Institute Fellow; Pioneer Works Narrative Arts Fellow; visiting artist at Stanford University Institute for Diversity in the Arts; Jerome Hill Artist Fellow; and Van Lier Fellow at the Public Theater. They have received additional development support from MAP Fund; Stanford University Ethics, Society, and Technology Hub; Tow Foundation; and National Endowment for the Arts.
During their block 8, 2019 residency Laia worked with Assistant Professor of Physics Dr. Natalie Gosnell on an ongoing collaborative project that uses techniques of experimental theater experience to explore Dr. Gosnell's research area of blue straggler stars and the physics of mass transfer. Their project, entitled "The Gift," creates an accessible learning experience for participants, regardless of their previous knowledge of physics. As part of their residency, Balasubramanian worked with Dr. Gosnell and a cohort of eight students to develop, test, and refine a new iteration of the interactive piece. A group of fifty-eight students, which included Dr. Gosnell's Physics for the Physical Sciences students, experienced this new version and provided feedback.
A Blue Straggler Story — Innovation at CC
What if you could embody, just for a moment, the life of a blue straggler star? Assistant Professor of Physics Natalie Gosnell and Innovator-in-Residence Janani Balasubramanian are in the process of developing an immersive, participatory experience that explores blue straggler stars and the physics of mass transfer, while challenging participants to consider connections, communities, and their place within the universe.