Lee Deigaard

Lee Deigaard has lived and worked in New Orleans since 2002. Trained as a sculptor, she works in a variety of media including photography, drawing, video, and painting. She graduated from Yale University with a major in fine arts and earned graduate degrees from the University of Michigan School of Art and Design and from the University of Texas at Austin where she held a Michener Fellowship in Creative Writing. Recurring themes in her work include animal protagonists, cross-species interactions and connections, ancient trees, bayous, the aftermath of the Gulf oil spill, and neural networks. She recently won the Clarence John Laughlin Award for photography administered by the New Orleans Photo Alliance, First Prize at the Southern Open at the Acadiana Center for the Arts for her video installation, and is represented in the Drawing Center’s Viewing Program in New York. Her Memorial to Topsy the elephant is on permanent display at the Coney Island Museum in Brooklyn, NY. She was a 2009 recipient of the Louisiana Division of the Arts Artist Fellowship, a 2009-10 artist-in-residence at Louisiana ArtWorks and is a member of the artist collective The Front.