Lisa Beth Robinson is the proprietor of Somnambulist Tango Press where she makes artists books (letterpress, papermaking, printmaking), broadsides, fine art, installations, curates exhibitions, and is an associate professor at the School of Art and Design at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina. In the summer of 2015 she began working in kiln-fused glass for an ongoing, collaborative project with sculptor Kristin Thielking. This led to her becoming a member of the Catching a Wave Collective (CAW), a group of multi- and transdisciplinary researchers from universities based in the USA, UK and Ireland, combining expertise in environmental and social sciences ranging from marine biology, climate change adaptation, coastal management, science communication, geography, sociology, human well-being, fine arts, visual arts, mixed media, graphic design, film, poetry, and sculpture. Her primary research focuses on two environmental issues: Colony Collapse Disorder and ocean health/sea level rise, under the umbrella of the global climate emergency.
Her work has been purchased by institutions such as the New York Public Library, the University of Chicago, Brown University, UC-Santa Cruz, Emory University, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Recent exhibitions include a solo exhibition at Longwood University (2022), the Craft Forms 2019 exhibition (Wayne Art Center, PA); the Bergstrom Mahler Museum of Glass (presenting and exhibiting); giving the Labino lecture at the Glass Art Society conference with Kristin Thielking; and jurying the “(retro)(intro)spection: moving past into the forward” exhibition at the San Francisco Center for the Book. Recent projects include giving workshops with CAW at the Ocean Sciences Meeting (AGU) 2020; the Art in the Anthropocene conference at Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland; and GirlCon Chicago(2020, 2022). Catching a Wave recently published an article, “Examining the Potential of Art-Science Collaborations in the Anthropocene: A Case Study of Catching a Wave.”
She holds a B.A. with Honors in Art from the Johnston Center at the University of Redlands and both an M.F.A. and M.L.I.S. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.