Artist Bio

About The Artist – Dr. Lisa Chu
Half Moon Bay, California (USA)

Websites:
http://themusicwithinus.com
https://5050art.wordpress.com (blog on the 50|50 process)
http://chinesemelodrama.com (Lisa’s acoustic rock music duo)

email: drlisachu(at)gmail(dot)com

phone: (650) 325-2194

Lisa Chu, M.D., is a self-taught artist. She was born in the Chicago area and has lived in California since 2004. Her early childhood included classical music training on both piano and violin starting at age three. This experience included solo performances around the world, including Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, for Pope John Paul II at the Vatican, and for President Boris Yeltsin in Moscow. She pursued academics in compliance with her parents’ wishes for her to occupy an unobjectionable, responsible station in society, completing an A.B. magna cum laude in Biochemical Sciences at Harvard University and an M.D. at the University of Michigan Medical School.

Since graduating from medical school, Lisa has not practiced western medicine but instead embarked on a meandering journey of self-exploration. First landing a job in a venture capital firm and becoming its youngest partner-track investment professional, and then moving to California from Cleveland to follow a childhood dream to start a violin school, Lisa has consistently broken boundaries within each of the worlds she has inhabited.

After five and a half years as the founder of her own signature violin training program for young children in Silicon Valley, she was led by life circumstances to begin discovering a path of personal healing, transformation, and creativity. During the five years since closing her school, Lisa began engaging in new ways of being, contrasting her academic background and classical training. She switched to improvisational music making, learned tools to become a deeper and more supportive witness to others through life coach training, and began spending time in silence, stillness, and solitude as a daily practice. She also discovered the disciplines of Breema bodywork and Thai massage, experiencing in tangible form that giving and receiving can happen simultaneously.

She first began playing with paint in 2013 as an exchange for Thai massage with a few artist friends. She immediately found painting to be an invigorating support to her practice of improvisation in all areas of life. The inspiration of natural beauty in her current home of Half Moon Bay, as well as travels to the pristine wilderness as a backpacker, have fueled a daily art practice that includes watercolor, acrylic paints, ink, charcoal, collage, and any media that strikes her fancy.

Lisa sees her art as a practice in self-acceptance and a vehicle for making visible the invisible layers of intention and consciousness present in all beings. Each piece represents a single moment that is as fleeting and eternal as a single breath, as precious and unifying as the life force within all that exists. She hopes her art will continue to be a playground for her curiosity and a rejuvenating part of her daily ritual.