Marisa Anderson

Marisa Anderson is a guitarist and composer from Portland, Oregon, whose instrumental work threads American primitive guitar through Delta blues, gospel, vintage country, and West African playing. She dropped out of college at nineteen and spent roughly fifteen years walking and hitchhiking across the United States and Mexico, and the cadence of that wandering still sets the tempo of her largely improvised compositions. Classically trained but schooled in country, jazz, and circus bands, she has released eleven albums since 2006, among them collaborations with drummer Jim White and guitarist William Tyler. The New Yorker has called her one of the most distinctive guitar players of her generation, and in 2025 she received the Spark Award for Oregon Artists. Her current work draws on a mid-twentieth-century archive of recorded music from the Islamic world, Southeast Asia, and the Soviet Union.