Marina LaPalma was born in Milan, Italy. She was a founder of Kelsey Street Press in Berkeley in the 1970s and a performance artist and art critic in Los Angeles in the 1980s. In the 1990s she was on the Board of The Children’s Book Project in San Francisco, a nonprofit dedicated to literacy-building in young children, and served on the Menlo Park Arts Commission for five years. For several years she was a bookseller at Stanford University Bookstore. She edited and wrote the preface for her late husband’s book: The Plenitude: Creativity, Innovation and Making Stuff, by Rich Gold (MIT Press, 2007). Since 2010 she has lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she wrote for eight years about visual art for The Magazine, and hosted Other Voices Other Sounds music show monthly on KUNM radio at the University of New Mexico. She now hosts Friday Night Freeform monthly, a music show on KSFR, Santa Fe Community Radio
Recent projects include:
- With collaborator Jay Cloidt she released a vinyl album of their songs, IXNA : Knotpop (Concentric Circles, 2018) available on Bandcamp.
- She edited and wrote the Foreword for the book Performance / Media / Art / Culture: Selected Essays 1983–2018 by Jacki Apple (Intellect Press, UK, 2019.)
- 2022 saw the creation of a Substack writing project in which she reviews and ruminates upon books that have shaped her, books she has made, books that seem super-important, books she has loved, clusters of books she has read that share a theme—memory, childhood, nostalgia, the soul of America, the rape of Africa, women and work, war, the endangered state of democracy, history, reciprocity with other living beings, anthropology, travel. https://marinadebellagentelapalma.substack.com/
