Project: A Performance-Lecture on the Mental Architecture of Magic

A performance-lecture led by artist and magician Jeanette Andrews. Magic performance combines with live-drawn overhead projections and philosophical conversation to investigate how and why we perceive and believe.

Andrews creates interactive, surreal performance vignettes utilizing elegant, yet common items combined with sleight of hand causing viewers to question the dynamic nature of perception. This program combines interactive magic with Andrews’ structural analysis of the scientific, social and philosophical underpinnings of why we believe in the seemingly impossible.

Jeanette Andrews is a magician, artist, and speaker and is hailed as one of the most innovative illusionists in the world today. Her work bridges the worlds of illusion, installation, and conceptual art, creating interactive vignettes and surreal, multisensory experiences that investigate perception, cognition, and the seemingly impossible. She invites audiences to co-create her illusory performances which function as live thought experiments. She has presented numerous commissioned works with the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Boca Raton Museum of Art, as well as for the Quebec City Biennial. Andrews has also held residencies with the Institute for Art and Olfaction in LA, the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts at the University of Houston, and is a former National Arts Club Artist Fellow and Affiliate of metaLAB at Harvard. She was a 2024-2025 Visiting Artist for the Center for Art, Science and Technology at MIT. She is the current Visiting Artist for the Arts Institute at Brown University.