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Born in Los Angles, California, Lisa Kirchner is the daughter of Leon Kirchner, the eminent contemporary classical composer, conductor and pianist; and Gertrude Kirchner, a singer, gourmet cook and beloved hostess. Lisa and her family moved from Los Angeles to Berkeley, lived for a short while in Rome, and New York, returned to Berkeley and then relocated to Cambridge, Massachusetts when her father joined the faculty of arts and sciences at Harvard University. Lisa had begun modern dance and ballet classes in Berkeley and classical piano in Cambridge. Soon, she was playing guitar, singing folk songs and performing at various theater, dance and music venues. At Sarah Lawrence College, Lisa studied acting with John Braswell, Wilford Leach, Viveca Lindfors, Andrei Serban, Billy Finley, Julie Bovasso and Irene Moore Jaglom, and in New York City, she studied with Wynn Handman, Myra Rostova, Austin Pendleton and John Basil. While in college, and thereafter, she was regularly performing in cabarets, concerts, plays, in musical theatre both on and off Broadway, and in jazz clubs where she delivered a brew of ambient jazz and crossover music as eclectic as her musical influences.
Lisa Kirchner appeared on Broadway in the New York Shakespeare Festival productions of The Threepenny Opera, understudying and appearing as Lucy Brown at the Public Theater and Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont; and in Galt MacDermot's The Human Comedy, directed by Wilford Leach at the Public Theater and the Royale Theater on Broadway. She created the original role of Irma Vep in Richard Foreman and Stanley Silverman's Hotel for Criminals and its sequel, The American Imagination in New York City. She has performed in numerous off and off-off Broadway productions including those at La Mama Theatre and annex, the Delacorte Theater, Westbeth, Riverside Church, Theater of the Open Eye, the American Place Theatre and, for two seasons, at the Lenox Arts Center, among other venues. On television, Lisa appeared as Edith Wharton's Undine Spragg on Bravo Cable Channel's Songs from the Heart, and as the ballad singer in Out of Our Father's House on WNET's Great Performances. As a singer-dancer, she performed in Grover Dale's Houdini, starring Christopher Walken in the title role, at the Lenox Arts Center; in Kiss Me Kate, starring Thomas Stewart and Evelyn Lear, at Wolf Trap; and with the James Waring Dance Company at Judson Memorial Church in New York City. She was Judy Collins' featured soloist at Carnegie Hall and accompanied Collins as background singer on television and recordings, and in live performances at venues including The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, The Greek Theater, the Roxie, the Joan Rivers Show, CBS This Morning, the Wheeler Opera House and Avery Fisher Hall. As a songwriter, she has written words and music and collaborated as lyricist with composers Galt Mac Dermot, James Weidman, and Ron Jackson.
In addition to her six solo vocal albums comprised of original songs, standards, and covers of theater, English, French, Portuguese, folk, and classical contemporary art songs, recorded on Albany Records and on Verdant World Records, Lisa has executive produced six albums of the works and performances of her father on the same labels. She has been a long-time photo researcher freelancing for the major American publishers, covering a vast array of topics in the arts and sciences, and providing images for young adult, college, trade, and visual art books. Recently, she compiled, edited, contributed to, designed and published an anthology of sixty-nine writings by and on her father, with one hundred five photographs, spanning sixty years of his collaborations with colleagues in the arts and sciences, under the title, Leon Kirchner and His Verdant World, published by Verdant World Productions in 2020.
Lisa Kirchner is a member of Actor's Equity, the Screen Actors Guild, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, and the performing rights society, Broadcast Music Incorporated.
