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Dr. Annette S. Lee
Astrophysicist | Artist | Author | Educator | Traditional Knowledge Keeper
- Native Skywatchers, Founder & Executive Director
- OSPAPIK, Senior Researcher
- Cosmic Footprint Society, Executive Board Member
Dr. Annette S. Lee, PhD, DSc, MFA, MFA, is an award-winning artist, scientist, and civic engagement leader, whose work is defined by visual and scientific activism. She is a world-class researcher, professional artist, and keeper of traditional knowledge, with bachelor, master, and doctoral degrees in mathematics, physics, and astrophysics, as well as degrees in fine arts and motion media design. The Founder/Director of the nonprofit Native Skywatchers, board member of the Cosmic Footprint Society, International Astronomical Union member, and a Senior Researcher for OSPAPIK (Ocean and Space Pollution, Artistic Practices, and Indigenous Knowledges) at Université de Bretagne Occidentale in Brest, France. Annette is Native American of Lakota, Irish and Chinese ancestry with Ojibwe community affiliation.
Lone Piñon is a New Mexican string band, or “orquesta típica”, whose music celebrates the integrity and diversity of their region’s cultural roots.
With fiddles, upright bass, guitars, accordions, vihuela, and bilingual vocals, they play a wide spectrum of the traditional music that is at home in New Mexico.
The musicians of Lone Piñon learned from elder musicians who instilled in them a respect for continuity and an example of the radicalism, creativity, and cross-cultural solidarity that has always been necessary for musical traditions to adapt and thrive in each generation. In 2014, Lone Piñon was founded as a platform for creativity around the oldest sounds of traditional New Mexico string music, sounds that had all but disappeared from daily life in many Northern New Mexico communities. Through relationship with elders, study of field recordings (including at the Library of Congress), connections to parallel traditional music and dance revitalization movements in the US and Mexico, and hundreds of local and national performances, they have brought the language of the New Mexico orquesta típica back onto the modern stage, back onto dance floors, into a contemporary aesthetic/artistic conversation, and into the ears of a young generation.