Overview
Lexi Turner is an artist, scholar and PhD candidate in the department of Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University. She holds an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths, University of London (from whom she received the Goldsmiths Excellence Fee Waiver Award), and a BA in Film Studies from King’s College London. Lexi’s dissertation “Decreativity: Shadows of Being and Horizons of Thought” invokes mysticism and pessimism as comparative philosophies of mediation in the analysis of film, sound, literature, and identity at the margins of culture.
As of the ‘23-’24 academic year, Lexi has designed and taught three freshman writing seminar courses. Power and Horror was a combination of critical theory and formal film analysis, using horror cinema as a means of discussing class, gender, race and sexuality. Bad was a survey class of cultural theory, focusing on topics of “badness” at a level of quality, efficacy, ethics and morality, from “bad music” to “bad language” and beyond. In Fall ‘23, she taught Sensation-al Feminisms—an exploration of feminist and queer theory, through the lens of emotion and the five senses—as the winner of the Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies FWS Award. She has also been a teaching assistant for both Global Cinema I and Thinking Media.
Within the department, Lexi acted as dramaturge for the class Staging Faith, providing linguistic, cultural and political context for Asif Khan’s Combustion. She was composer and sound designer for Kelly Richmond’s installation-theater production Haunted Natures, Hidden Environments. She has also been a member of the Performances and Events committee, and has worked as a writer for Cornell Cinema, providing blurbs and descriptions for many films in the Fall ‘22 program. In the Winter of ‘23 to Spring of ‘24, Lexi was a member of the FGSS/LGBT+ Studies joint hiring committee with the Psychology department. Also in this period, Lexi was a member, programmer, and event host for the Trans Studies Now speaker series committee.
In March 2024, Lexi’s chapter “Obsession/Abstraction: The Fetish and The Rita,” was published in The Rita: Correlations, by Amaya Productions. Her chapter “Everything Burns: Lingua Ignota and the Counter-Actualization of Repetition” will be published in the forthcoming Routledge anthology, Strategies of Resistance: Women and Femme Voices in Metal Music, Culture, and Scholarship. A regular attendee and speaker at media, film, and musicology conferences internationally, Lexi has given three papers at SCMS: “‘I Have Found a New Form of Prayer’: Eco-Theology in First Reformed” (2022); “Decay Mummified: Difference and Disintegration in the Found-Footage Avantgarde” (2023); and “‘Formless and Alone’: Ritual and Reception Between Begotten and You With Your Memory are Dead” (2024). In Spring of ‘24, Lexi was an invited lecturer on topics of race and racism in Black Metal at the Manhattan campus of St. Lawrence University.
Outside academia, Lexi is best known as a musician and sound artist, with almost 40 albums, EPs, and compilations. Her primary act Prayer Rope was listed as one of “the greatest contemporary experimental projects” by Discipline Mag in 2023. She was co-host and programmer of the London Action Resource Centre’s monthly cinema series the LARC Film Club, and has hosted several consciousness-raising workshops on radical sobriety and community outreach. In 2019, she was a reader and performer at multiple events of the Resilient and Resisting oral history, collaborative storytelling, and queer archival project, both at the Hackney Museum and Arcola Theatre. In 2017, Lexi was a panelist at the closing event for Terre Thaemlitz’ Interstices exhibition at the Auto Italia gallery.