is one of the first contemporary artists to use light as a medium of expression and perhaps the first to compose recurring motivic and thematic statements and permutations with light over time as in music. Over more than five decades Zazeela has exhibited a unique iconographic vision in media encompassing painting, calligraphic drawing, graphics, film, light performance, sculpture, and environment. Expanding the traditional concepts of painting and sculpture while incorporating elements of both disciplines, she created an original visual language in the medium of light by combining colored light mixtures with sculptural forms to generate seemingly three-dimensional colored shadows in radiant vibrational fields.

Zazeela’s work has taken the directions of performance in Ornamental Lightyears Tracery, sculpture in the series Still Light and neon Dream House Variations I–IV, environment in Dusk/Dawn Adaptation, Magenta Day / Magenta Night and her major work Light, and video projection in Quadrilateral Phase Angle Traversals.

From 1961 to 1962, Zazeela worked extensively with legendary filmmaker Jack Smith. She was the featured model in The Beautiful Book (1962) and appeared in Smith’s revolutionary Flaming Creatures, which was written for her and for which she also created the calligraphy for the film titles and credits. In 1964, Zazeela was filmed for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests (Andy Warhol Screen Tests, Harry N. Abrams, 2006) and was selected to be one of the models included in his Thirteen Most Beautiful Women series.

Zazeela began singing with Young in 1962 as a founding member of The Theatre of Eternal Music, and performed as vocalist in almost every concert of the ensemble to date. In 1970, she became one of the first Western disciples of renowned master vocalist Pandit Pran Nath and has since performed and taught the Kirana style of Indian classical music. She accompanied Pandit Pran Nath in hundreds of concerts throughout the world and continues to perform in The Just Alap Raga Ensemble, which she founded with Young and Choi in 2002.

As artistic director of The Theatre of Eternal Music, she creates the works that form the innovative visual components of Dream House, a sound and light work in which she collaborates with composer La Monte Young. Zazeela has presented Dream Houses, light installations, performances, and calligraphic drawing exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe. Major installations include the Guggenheim Museum exhibition The Third Mind, American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989 (2009), 2005 Lyon Biennale Tate Liverpool, Centre Pompidou, Berlin’s Ruine der Künste, 1990 Venice Biennale, Galerie Hans Mayer in Düsseldorf, MELA Foundation’s La Monte Young 30-Year Retrospective in New York City, and Köln Kunstverein. She has received grants from the NEA, EAT, CAPS, Lannan and Cassandra Foundations. In 2009 she was the recipient with Young of the first Yoko Ono Courage Award in the arts to honor their having “never strayed from giving their uniquely creative efforts in Art to the world.”

Under a commission from the Dia Art Foundation (1979–85), Zazeela and Young collaborated in a six-year continuous Dream House presentation set in the six-storey Harrison Street building in New York, featuring multiple interrelated sound and light environments, exhibitions, performances, research and listening facilities, and archives.

At the invitation of the French government for La Beauté exhibition celebrating the Year 2000, Young and Zazeela created a fourmonth Dream House in St. Joseph Chapel in Avignon. The installation featured the continuous DVD projection of the 1987 sixhour 24-minute performance of their collaborative masterwork, The Well-Tuned Piano in The Magenta Lights, in a site-specific light environment created by Zazeela. The art centre Kunst im Regenbogenstadl, Polling, Bavaria, presented a comprehensive solo exhibition of Zazeela’s drawings. In 2001, Kunst im Regenbogenstadl initiated a long-term light installation designed by Zazeela, featuring DVD projection, two new sculptures, an installation, and her neon work. The installation has continued through the present with the inclusion of a new video projection work, S symmetry V.1, as well as the video installation of the 21 March 2009 concert from the Guggenheim Dream House. In 2010, a large new entrance gallery space was added in Regenbogenstadl featuring two symmetrically placed pairs of Zazeela’s signature mobiles.

In 2012, Zazeela created Dream House installations and performed with The Just Alap Raga Ensemble in five Pandit Pran Nath Memorial Tribute Tour concerts in Berlin, Karlsruhe and Polling, with live video streaming of the Berlin concerts to the AngelicA Festival in Bologna and Fondazione Mudima in Milan.