Laura Lea Nalle is a multidisciplinary artist turned creative director from Austin, Texas, where she was born and raised into a family with a long and colorful history, so her proclivity for innovative 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. At Pratt, she was introduced to the school of thought known as Critical Theory and instantly fell in love with the world of ideas as they show us how to live a more meaningful life. Laura Lea went on to complete a master’s degree in Applied Philosophy & Ethics with a specialty in Aesthetics. She conducted her thesis research at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, where she explored the significance of participation in aesthetic experience. The core of Laura Lea’s philosophical and artistic inquiry aims essentially at one thing, namely exploring ways in which we may become better people – more engaged and more capable of experiencing love and beauty – and thereby live freer, more meaningful lives.

In her art, Laura Lea draws on a wide range of materials and processes and loves using mixed media and found objects because it makes her look at things in the world in new and unexpected ways. She loves the tension and interplay between the minimal, clean surfaces of industrial materials and the outworn, decayed items she finds throughout her travels. No matter the medium she’s working in, her art always implicates the viewer, whether through overt participation and call to action or through more subtle means such as viewers’ reflections and shadows cast onto the surface. Laura Lea’s work has been featured on the Sundance Channel, MTV Networks, and published internationally, including on the cover of SXSWorld Magazine.

For more than a decade, Laura Lea worked with Art Seen Alliance to direct, produce, manage, and curate the annual Art Outside festival in Downtown, Texas. She feels her involvement with the event was an extension of her own art making process. She enjoyed collaborating with the close-knit production team and extensive community of hundreds of artists to create an elaborate, immersive environment for thousands of people to experience. She loved bearing witness to the spontaneous acts of expression and participation that occur in such unique spaces and reveled in seeing how these experiences brought greater meaning and beauty into people’s lives.

Part of Laura Lea’s unique perspective on life comes from living in India full time for a number of very formative and enriching years. She initially started going to Mysore India to deepen her yoga and meditation practices and then fell in love with the people and the culture and moved there full time. She believes yoga is the most relevant and worthwhile endeavor in her life; it is her anchor and north star. All she does in this world grows from the clarity and fortitude she finds in yoga. It makes possible any revelation of love and beauty in her work – and in any facet of her life in general. During her time in India, she became deeply involved with a non-profit organization with global outreach programs to improve education access for underprivileged women and children. Her experiences there were life affirming and illuminating in ways that still reverberate in her life today.

During the initial pandemic lockdown in 2020, Laura Lea decided to make the best of her time by doing an intensive Permaculture Design Certification course through Oregon State University. She always felt an affinity with permaculture principles of design and is enjoying putting these principles to use in a variety of ways in her art and everyday life. One day she hopes to build a permaculture-informed retreat center for artists, yoga students, and spiritual aspirants of all denominations to reconnect with nature and themselves. She believes when people experience permaculture-informed spaces, it inspires them to work towards more sustainable practices in their everyday lives. It is through the small and seemingly inconsequential decisions we make every day that we are able to shape our future for the better.

Laura Lea maintains a daily yoga and meditation practice, cultivates a thriving edible landscape garden full of heirloom vegetables and fruit trees, raises a small backyard flock of rare and heritage breed chickens, and enjoys the delectable alchemy of gourmet vegetarian cooking. When not traveling or working in exotic locales around the world, she works from her home studio in the central Texas hill country near Austin where she lives with her beloved dogs, cats, and parrot.

ॐ असतो मा सद्गमय । तमसो मा ज्योतिर्गमय । मृत्योर्माऽमृतं गमय । ॐ शान्ति: शान्ति: शान्ति: ॥