Anna Lindemann’s work integrates her passion for multi-disciplinary art and biology. Combining music, animation, video, and performance, her pieces Theory of Flight, Winged One, Bird Brain, and The Flying Curiosities of the Plant & Animal Kingdoms explore biological development and evolution. In Theory of Flight, dreams of flight, avian arias, a magical chalkboard, transgenic experiments, animations of cellular processes, orchestral bird songs, and molecular music intersect in an emotional and scientific pursuit of human flight. The animated bird characters in Bird Brain take inspiration from the peculiar natures of brood parasites and bowerbirds. In both works, biological processes are illuminated using pasta, hats, buttons, yarn and bits of lace. The installation Flying Curiosities of the Plant & Animal Kingdoms weaves together reflections on flight by Alfred Russell Wallace and Etienne-Jules Marey with animated vignettes of the evolutionary origins of flight, and the developmental origins of feather growth and wings in real and fictive species.
Many of Anna’s musical compositions explore nature in its poignancy, absurdity, and complexity—from the musical depiction of the determined dung beetle in Garden Suite, which she composed as an eight-year-old, to recent explorations of music inspired from developmental biology systems in Theory of Flight, Winged One, Bird Brain, Where do you come from little seedling? and Evo-Devo Music. Anna has enjoyed artistic collaborations as well—writing the music for two ballets, theater, and film. She has received awards for her musical compositions from the MATA Festival, ASCAP, MTNA, Collage New Music, The Pikes Peak Young Composers Competition, the Spokane Music and Allied Arts Festival, the Yale Sudler Fund for the Creative and Performing Arts, and the Yale Music Department Abraham Beekman Cox Prize. Anna has studied composition at The Walden School, and at the Boston University Tanglewood Institute, as well as with her father Eric Lindemann, with Neil Rolnick at RPI, and with Kathryn Alexander, Michael Klingbeil, Yevgeniy Sharlat, and Orianna Webb at Yale University.
Anna’s works have been performed at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC), Yale University’s Woolsey Hall and Sudler Hall, Harvard University’s Paine Hall, and the Dairy Center for the Performing Arts in Boulder, CO.
Anna graduated magna cum laude from Yale College with a B.S. in Biology. She conducted field research on bird speciation and bird calls in Indonesia, and she received the Edgar J. Boell Prize for her thesis research on genes involved in the patterning of wing eyespots during butterfly development. Anna received the DeWitt Wallace Fellowship, the Ellis and Karin Chingos ’37 Graduate Fellowship, and the Rensselaer Graduate Fellowship for her study at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute where she received an MFA in Integrated Electronic Arts in May 2011. Beginning in the fall of 2011, Anna will be a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Colgate University.