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.

"I was so excited to be offered that role in Little Bird. They sent me the scripts, and I read them, and I wept so much just reading those scripts because the story is so profoundly sad. And I was really very honored to be playing a Jewish Holocaust survivor caught up in a very difficult story. I was also honored to be on set. And a good part of the time that I was there, we were on Indian reservations, having cultural sharing time, listening to their stories, and really just being a witness to what they experienced. So a lot of that was very profound for me working on that project, and being able to tell the story that my character owned was, of course, really personal to me just being Jewish. A lot of times, being Jewish, we don't necessarily get to play Jewish. So it was really important to me that I honor that story the best that I could."

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

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Photo credit: Mitch Stone
Courtesy of the artist