Lisa Gordillo

Biography

Lisa Gordillo is an artist, writer, widow, and grief advocate. Her work explores witness, connection, comfort, and repair.

At Michigan Tech, Lisa teaches sculpture, drawing, stage design, and large-format painting. Her courses focus on community-engaged arts practices, sustainability, and encouraging students as they develop their personal arts language. 

She loves dogs, trees, and the color pink.

Creative Work: Real Place Projects

Lisa is the creative director of Real Place Projects, an arts organization that supports small, rural communities in the U.S. and Guatemala. Real Place designs and creates projects, events, and works of art that address community needs through creativity and play.

Real Place Projects pushes back on the idea that some places are more important or more deserving of resources than others, and works to harness resources smaller communities can use to make changes they want to see. Every place is a real place. 

Right now, Real Place is creating a collection of "movable libraries" for a school in Guatemala.

Creative Work: Sister Forests

Sister Forests is an international collaboration between forests on the island of Björkö-Arholma, Sweden and the Keweenaw Peninsula in Michigan. The concept is much like a “sister city,” but instead of an urban partnership, the project connects two forests and the people living among them: “sister forests.”

The project builds environmental stewardship and human connection with exchanges of art, forest research, and community projects. Collaborators in Sweden and the U.S. use their different expertise to support one another.  One of the project’s core ideas is that the ways we care for our forests help us to build stronger community ties, and because of that, environmental work can lead to a more peaceful world.

The study abroad program Sustainability in Sweden is part of this project.

Creative Work: Sit with me

I’ve always been interested in hidden stories. Throughout my life, I've wondered about what is underneath the story we tell, what is underneath the story we accept, and why it’s underneath and not on top.

As a widow, I learned quickly on a personal level what I had often spoken about from a safer distance: that our culture is uncomfortable with difficult stories, challenging histories, things that take time. 

But when we’re storytelling, making art, or holding something challenging, we’re holding something precious.

In grief and trauma scholarship we learn over and over that hard experiences must be witnessed.  Witness – holding space for hard, complicated stories, being willing to sit with, is critical support.

Sit with me is a collection of art, writing, and connection-making that focuses on community, comfort, and care, framed within that magical, necessary kindness called witness.