About
Lara Balikci is an interdisciplinary music theorist specializing in the late 19th- and 20th-century European avant-garde and a Neubauer Family Distinguished Doctoral Fellow.
Lara was previously the Research Assistant in Modern and Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she assisted in curatorial work for Remedios Varo: Science Fictions (2023) and co-organized a multi-month research symposium on Remedios Varo (1908–1963) in the spring of 2022. Her research on music and the esoteric teachings of George Gurdjieff and Pytor Ouspensky in Varo’s painting Harmony (1956) and on her sculpture Homo Rodans was published as two essays in the exhibition catalogue distributed by Yale University Press. Lara presented her work at the 2023 International Society for the Study of Surrealism. She also contributed research to a collection survey on Joseph Cornell and to the exhibition Salvador Dalí: The Image Disappears (2023), among other projects, and executed a public tour on music and modernism in November 2023.
Lara holds an M.A. in Music Theory with concentration in Gender and Women’s Studies from McGill University, where she was awarded the Schulich Scholarship and Shree Mulay Graduate Award in Gender and Women’s Studies. She wrote her thesis using Sara Ahmed’s queer phenomenology as a framework to understand problems that arise with furniture music. She presented her research widely, including at the 2021 Society for Music Theory and Philosophy Interest Group and various graduate student conferences.
Lara received her B.A. in Music, summa cum laude, from the University of Pennsylvania, where she was a Benjamin Franklin Scholar and participant in the Integrated Studies Program. In her thesis, she applied David Lewin’s phenomenological p-model to Erik Satie’s Vexations (1893-1894). Lara studied abroad at King’s College London, at the Institut de recherche et coordination acoustique/musique (Ircam) through the Eastman School of Music’s graduate seminar on the theory and analysis of contemporary music, and at Boğaziçi University in their Turkish Language and Culture Program. She also worked at the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts and spent the summer of 2016 in Nepal at a Tibetan Buddhist monastery.
Lara is currently reading Tibetan Buddhist philosophy and a board member of the University of Chicago Buddhist Association. She is a classically trained flutist.
Teaching Experience
Teaching Assistant, McGill University
- MUTH 150: Theory and Analysis 1 (Department of Music Research, Fall 2021)
- GSFS 250: Gender and Sexual Diversity (Institute of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminism, Fall 2021 and 2022)