When Black Swallows Red, Metropolitan Art Gallery Association, La Mama, New York, NY, July 2019
Michael Lasater was born in 1947 in Hutchinson, Kansas. A graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and the Juilliard School, he performed as a professional trombonist for more than a decade with ensembles including the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus Band; Aspen Festival Orchestra; United States Military Academy Band, West Point; Metropolitan Opera; Bolshoi Opera of Moscow; New Jersey Symphony Orchestra; Tanglewood Fellowship Orchestra/Boston Symphony Orchestra; National Orchestral Association, New York; and Spoleto Festival Orchestra, Italy. Conductors included James Levine, Rafael Kubelik, Sixten Ehrling, Giuseppe Patanè, James Conlon, Victoria Bond, Walter Susskind, Leonard Slatkin, Darius Milhaud, and Seiji Ozawa. As Director of Marketing for the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra, he produced the SSO’s Carnegie Hall debut in 1978, a return Carnegie Hall concert in 1980 with Keith Jarrett, and full orchestra and chamber ensemble engagements throughout upstate New York.
His degrees in filmmaking and communication are from Syracuse University. He is the creator of several documentaries on subjects in music, literature, and poetry, with broadcast and distribution by the National Educational Television Association/PBS, Barr Films, Kentucky Educational Television, and Coronet Film & Video. His work has won awards from the American Film Festival, San Francisco International Film Festival, International Film and Television Festival of New York, National Monitor Awards of New York, and U.S. Film and Video Festival, Chicago.
His gallery and installation work in video is in museum and private collections and has appeared in well over one hundred solo, invitational and juried exhibitions, winning numerous awards. Venues include La Mama, New York; Film and Video Poetry Society Symposium, Los Angeles; Long-Sharp Gallery, Indianapolis/New York; Hun Gallery, New York; Art in General, New York; Örebro International Video Art Festival, Sweden; artvideoKÖLN events in Europe, the US and Asia; Los Angeles Center for Contemporary Art; South Bend Museum of Art; Kansas City Artists Coalition; Union Street Gallery, Chicago; Around the Coyote Gallery, Chicago; California Museum of Photography; Athens Institute for Contemporary Art; Dallas Center for Contemporary Art; and Target Gallery. In April, 2007, in recognition of his work in documentary film and video art, he became the first artist faculty member at Indiana University South Bend to receive the IUSB Distinguished Research Award.
He has published poetry in La Piccioletta Barca; The Coop: A Poetry Cooperative; The Closed Eye Open; Heartland! Poetry of Love, Resistance and Solidarity; Kansas Time + Place: An Anthology of Heartland Poetry (Little Balkans Press); Cathexis Northwest Press; Oregon Poetry Association; and The Heartland Review, where he is the winner of the 2019 Joy Bale Boone Poetry Prize. His poems appear in the 2019 – 2024 chapbooks of ekphrastic poetry produced by the South Bend Museum of Art, in IU Scholarworks, and in INverse, the juried Indiana state poetry archive established by Poetry Magazine editor Adrian Matejka.
Following four decades in higher education at Western Kentucky University and Indiana University South Bend, he is IUSB Professor Emeritus of Mass Communications and past Chair, Department of Integrated New Media Studies, a cross-disciplinary BFA program he established at IUSB in 2008, graduating over two hundred majors by the time of his retirement in May, 2022.