Marian Zazeela

Marian Zazeela (born April 15, 1940) is a light-artist, designer, painter and musician based in New York City. Marian Zazeela is one of the first contemporary artists to use light as a medium of expression. In over three decades of work, she has exhibited a unique iconographic vision in a variety of media encompassing painting, calligraphic drawing, graphics, film, light projection, sculpture, and environment.

Expanding the traditional concepts of painting and sculpture while incorporating elements of both disciplines, Marian Zazeela has developed a unique visual language in the medium of light by combining colored light mixtures with sculptural forms to create seemingly three-dimensional colored shadows in radiant vibrational fields.

As artistic director of The Theatre of Eternal Music she creates the works that form the visual components of Dream House, a sound and light environment in which she collaborates with composer La Monte Young. Under a long-term commission from the Dia Art Foundation (1979-85), Marian Zazeela and La Monte Young collaborated on a 6-year continuous Dream House presentation in the former New York Mercantile Exchange, New York City. Her recent long-term installation, Imagic Light, forms a part of Dream House: Seven Years of Sound and Light, which opened at MELA Foundation, New York, in 1993 and will be on view through the year 2000.

In 1970, along with Terry Riley and La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela began her studies with the north Indian vocal master Pandit Pran Nath. They became his disciples, a relationship that continued until Pran Nath's death in June 1996.