How can the arts help us examine and engage with social issues? How do our families shape our views, memories, and experience of the world?

From her role as Dr. Lisa Cuddy on the hit Fox series House, to her starring role as Abby McCarthy in Bravo's first scripted series Girlfriend's Guide to Divorce, Lisa Edelstein's range of roles are as diverse talent. Some of Edelstein's feature credits include Keeping the Faith, What Women Want, Daddy Daycare, As Good as It Gets, and Fathers and Sons. She played a Holocaust survivor and adopted mother in the drama television series Little Bird. The story centres on a First Nations woman who was adopted into a Jewish family during the Sixties Scoop, as she attempts to reconnect with her birth family and heritage.

Lisa’s career began by writing, composing, and performing an original AIDS awareness musical Positive Me at the renowned La Mama Experimental Theater Club in New York City. In the wake of COVID, Lisa began to paint using old family photographs as starting points. Her incredibly detailed paintings capture intimate relationships and spontaneous moments with honesty and compassion.

"When I did my show Positive Me, we were in the middle of a horrible crisis. The AIDS crisis was very real to me and my friends and not real to the people that I knew from New Jersey. They thought it was government hype. They didn't believe in it. And so I couldn't even fathom that. And I had taken a class with Elizabeth Swados about writing satire, and she was very encouraging in terms of what I was doing. And so maybe it was just gumption. I just thought, Okay, then this is what I'm going to do!"

"I had the first ever lesbian makeout scene on network television on a short-lived show called Relativity. That was another role where I felt really honored to be asked to do that, having been in and around the gay community my whole adult life. In the club scene, it was like all my friends were gay. So I was really happy to represent doing that."

https://lisaedelstein.komi.io/
www.lisaedelsteinpaintings.com/
www.imdb.com/name/nm0249046

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Photo credit: Mitch Stone
Courtesy of the artist