About
Lara Balikci is an interdisciplinary music theorist and a Neubauer Family Distinguished Doctoral Fellow. Her research interests include the Tibetan performing arts broadly, including contemporary Tibetan circle dance, the history of Tibetan music theory, Tibetan musical notation (dbyangs), Tibetan ritual music, and Tibetan Buddhism. Lara studies the Tibetan language with Professor Karma Ngodup la at the University of Chicago and previously studied at the Rangjung Yeshe Institute in Kathmandu, Nepal. She is an avid dancer of Gorshey (Tibetan circle dancing) and trained with the dance troupe Bhayul Kordoling while in Kathmandu. Lara continues to dance Gorshey in both New York and Chicago, where she is an active dancer with the Tibetan Alliance of Chicago’s Gorshey group. As the facilitator of the University of Chicago’s Tibetan Table, a collective of students who practice Tibetan language and performing arts, she organizes Tibetan-related events on campus, including an evening of Gorshey in Fulton Recital Hall, the Tibet Gala at the International House, among others.
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 and member of the Univeristy of Chicago’s South Asian Music Ensemble, Middle Eastern Music Ensemble, and Modal Collective.
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)