American Masters: Lou Reed. Image courtesy of Susan Lacy/PBS.
ACADEMY ICONS: SUSAN LACY
LOU REED: ROCK AND ROLL HEART
WITH SUSAN LACY, LAURIE ANDERSON & TIMOTHY GREENFIELD- SANDERS
TICKETS $25 ($22.50 FOR MEMBERS)
Musician, poet, and composer Lou Reed made rock and roll into avant-garde. This incredible retracing of Reed’s evolution is filled with interviews with the artist, his friends, and some of the major artists he influenced. With David Bowie, David Byrne, John Cale, Philip Glass, and Patti Smith. Followed by a talk with Susan Lacy, multidisciplinary artist and Reed’s wife, Laurie Anderson, and director Timothy Greenfield-Sanders.
Film Run Time: 72 Minutes
Guild Hall introduces Academy Icons, a new program that spotlights Guild Hall Academy of the Arts members and their work. Inaugurating the series is Susan Lacy, an acclaimed director and producer best known for creating American Masters, the PBS biography series, which began in 1986, profiling artists and visionaries who have helped shape our country’s culture. Her subjects have included James Baldwin, Bob Dylan, Judy Garland, David Geffen, Lena Horne, Joni Mitchell, and hundreds more. American Masters garnered unprecedented awards over the years. Susan earned the series 71 Emmy nominations and 28 wins, including a remarkable ten for Outstanding Non-Fiction Series, in addition to 13 Peabody Awards, three Grammy Awards and a nomination, and an Academy Award and four nominations. Since moving to HBO in 2013, Susan has directed and produced Spielberg, Jane Fonda in Five Acts, Very Ralph, and executive produced The Janes, all for HBO Documentary Films. Among many other distinctions, Susan served as the Governor of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for eight years, is an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences member and a cherished member of Guild Hall’s Academy.
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Susan Lacy
Susan Lacy is an acclaimed director and producer best known for creating American Masters (launched in 1986), the PBS biography series profiling artists and visionaries who have helped shape our country’s culture. Her subjects have included James Baldwin, Bob Dylan, Judy Garland, David Geffen, Lena Horne, Joni Mitchell, and hundreds more. American Masters garnered unprecedented awards over the years. Susan earned the series 71 Emmy nominations and 28 wins, including a remarkable ten for Outstanding Non-Fiction Series, in addition to 13 Peabody Awards, three Grammy Awards and a nomination, and an Academy Award and four nominations. Since moving to HBO in 2013, Susan has directed and produced Spielberg, Jane Fonda in Five Acts, Very Ralph, and executive produced The Janes, all for HBO Documentary Films. Among many other distinctions, Susan was a Governor of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for eight years, is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and a cherished member of Guild Hall’s Academy.
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Laurie Anderson
Laurie Anderson is one of America’s most renowned—and daring—creative pioneers. Her work, which encompasses music, visual art, poetry, film, and photography, has challenged and delighted audiences around the world for more than forty years. In a recent "60 Minutes" profile, Anderson Cooper said she “is a pioneer of the avant-garde, but ... that doesn’t begin to describe what she creates. Her work isn’t sold in galleries. It’s experienced by audiences who come to see her perform: singing, telling stories, and playing strange violins of her own invention ... she [blends] the beautiful and the bizarre, challenging audiences with homilies and humor. She blurs boundaries across music, theater, dance, and film.” The Washington Post has said she “doesn’t just tell stories; she draws out every word with a kind of physical pleasure, tasting its flavor as she probes the everyday mysteries of life,” and the Guardian has called Anderson “one of the great popular artists and storytellers of our time.”
Anderson released her first album with Nonesuch Records in 2001, the critically lauded Life on a String. Her subsequent releases on the label include Live in New York (2002), Homeland (2010), the soundtrack to Anderson’s acclaimed film Heart of a Dog (2015), and her Grammy-winning collaboration with Kronos Quartet, Landfall (2018). Additionally, Anderson’s virtual-reality film La Camera Insabbiata, with Hsin-Chien Huang, won the 2017 Venice Film Festival Award for Best VR Experience, and, in 2018, Skira Rizzoli published her book All the Things I Lost in the Flood: Essays on Pictures, Language and Code, the most comprehensive collection of her artwork to date.
Recent exhibitions and installations of Anderson’s work include Habeas Corpus at New York’s Park Avenue Armory; her largest exhibition to date, The Weather, at Washington, DC’s Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum of Modern Art; and Looking into a Mirror Sideways at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, which was her largest European exhibition to date. Anderson recently toured with Sex Mob, performing her piece Let X=X. Earlier this year, she was awarded the 2024 Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication, along with Christopher Nolan and David Attenborough, and the International Astronomical Union named a minor planet in her honor: Asteroid 270588.
Photo: Ebru Yildiz
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Timothy Greenfield-Sanders
Photographer/filmmaker Timothy Greenfield-Sanders is known for his strikingly intimate portraits of world leaders and major cultural figures. From Presidents to porn stars, artists to Oscar winners, Greenfield-Sanders’ work defines a certain cultural photographic canon of our time.
Greenfield-Sanders has produced and directed thirteen feature documentaries, winning numerous awards including a Grammy Award for his 1998 film Lou Reed: Rock and Roll Heart, two NAACP Spirit Awards in 2009 for The Black List: Volume 1 and in 2020 for Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am and three Emmy nominations.
In 2015 he was awarded the Legend Award by Pratt Institute. His most recent exhibition, Identity Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, The List Portraits, was at the The Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles. His latest film, The A List: AAPI is currently in production for HBO.
Photo: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders
Sponsors
Performing Arts programming is supported in part by funding from The Melville Straus Family Endowment, and Monica and Peter Tessler. Music Programming is supported in part by The Ellen and James S. Marcus Endowment for Musical Programming.
Additional support provided by Friends of the Theater: John and Joan D’Addario, Christine and Bill Campbell, Gabrielle and Gianpaolo de Felice, Galia Meiri-Stawski and Axel Stawski, Hilarie and Mitchell Morgan, Michèle and Steve Pesner, The Schaffner Family Foundation, Lisa Schultz and Ezriel Kornel, Jayne Baron Sherman and Deborah Zum, Leila Straus, and Susi and Peter Wunsch.