Shelley Lake SM '79
Pioneering a Path through the Arts and Healing
Shelley Lake's SM '79 career may have ricocheted her between coasts and disciplines, but there's one place she will always be—on the cusp. From Easthampton, Mass., Lake provides artists and museums nationwide with fine art reproduction services and giclée (spray) printmaking (www.skylakestudios.com). An award-winning photographer, she combines ultra high resolution digital photos with advanced, large-format Epson archival printers.
"There are only a dozen photographers in the country with a rig like mine," she says. Using top-quality archival paper and pigmented inks, Lake creates prints and panorama images of startling clarity and color fidelity (www.shelleylake.com).
Lake won a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies after graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1976. At MIT, Lake was a pioneer becoming the first woman graduate of the master's in visual studies studio program in 1979. "My time at MIT was terrific—a broad exposure that was interdisciplinary, highly experimental, and very process oriented," she recalls. She helped create the first all-slide optical videodisk and trained with the legendary Dr. Harold Edgerton SM '27, ScD '31.
She took her groundbreaking abilities to Digital Productions, a state-of-the-art animation company based in Los Angeles. Her projects included The Last Starfighter, the first all computer-generated feature film without miniatures. The two-year project crafted on a $12 million Cray supercomputer won an Academy Award for technical achievement. "We'd work 16-18 hour days in a building with no windows or clocks. But the dailies were so mind-blowing, you couldn't wait to get at it again." Lake's other work has won three Clio Awards for computer animation.
After a bout with cancer, Lake spent a decade mastering massage modalities and Chinese traditional medicine, becoming a licensed EMT, and earning her doctor of chiropractic degree. Lake is now a licensed chiropractor, living in western Massachusetts and combining her passions.
"I realized that choosing the fine arts while keeping a hand in the healing arts offers the right balance for me," she says. "It's really been wonderful."
(First published in Technology Review, August 2005)
