anna rg is a disabled artist, musician, and community organizer living in Lenapehoking/Brooklyn, currently focused on mask distribution, and accessibility in arts spaces. She is a fiddler, banjo player, filmmaker, archivist, visual artist, and researcher -- a storyteller in many forms.
She collaborates primarily with ballad singer Elizabeth LaPrelle. Their work together, rooted in archival and place-based research, is centered in their multi-media shows together which integrate music, dance, storytelling, and scrolling illustrations called "crankies." Their work continues to branch out into worlds of film and dance, centered always on exploring the old music and singers, and our relationship to the past.
Her 2016 MacDowell residency, with collaborator Elizabeth LaPrelle, seeded their album The Invisible Comes to Us, of re-orchestrated New England folk songs. Released by Smithsonian Folkways, it was dubbed “a radical expansion of what folk songs are supposed to do,” by The New Yorker. They also worked on a series of new videos, dance pieces, and song arrangements in preparation for a series of tours through the U.S. and the U.K., inspired by archival research into traditional song collectors from the 1940s. The two were featured on NPR's Tiny Desk concert series to celebrate their second record's release, in 2015.
While at MacDowell in 2024, she worked on a song cycle of songs centering on illness and researched a podcast about the history of Sick Music both speculative and actual.
