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, and a BA in Film Studies from King’s College London. Lexi’s dissertation, tentatively titled “Decreativity: Shadows of Being and Horizons of Thought” engages in theories of ontology and mediation in the context of postmodernism, pessimism, mysticism and political philosophy.
As of 2022, Lexi has designed and taught two freshman writing seminar courses. Power and Horror was a combination of critical theory and formal film analysis, using modern and contemporary 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. She has also been a teaching assistant for both Global Cinema I and Thinking Media.
Within the department, she acted as dramaturge for the class Staging Faith, providing linguistic, cultural and political context for Asif Khan’s Combustion. She also acted as score composer and sound designer for the installation-theater production Haunted Natures, Hidden Environments. She has also worked as a writer for Cornell Cinema, providing blurbs and descriptions for many of the films in the Fall ‘22 program.
Outside academia, Lexi is best known for her theological harsh noise project Prayer Rope. An active member of the east coast experimental music scene, she also performs as And the Maiden, as a member of Homocidal, the dungeon synth outfit Avoidance, the noise supergroup Tsalal, and the Pink Triangle Series and The Lethal Temple collectives. 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.
As of Fall ‘22, Lexi is currently on her Sage Fellowship year.