Pianist, Doctor of music and researcher Anu Lampela (née Vehviläinen) is a versatile actor in the art world. Lampela is interested in the hidden areas of art music and the issues which are not talked about out loud. In her activities, she has highlighted the artist's tacit knowledge and developed musician's education, especially at the university level.
The focus of the artistic work has been on the works for piano as well as violin & piano by the Polish composer Karol Szymanowski (1882–1937) and Lampela has recorded the whole solo piano output for Alba Records.
Lampela has dedicated to promoting artist-audience interaction in her program Open Artist & Dear Audience (2009–2015) with workshops, seminars, lectures and lecture recitals. Between 2015–2020 Lampela was a member of the artistic research group, the Silence Ensemble, with dancer Kirsi Heimonen and visual artist Petri Kaverma. The group developed their own collaborative artistic research method, gave several lectures and organized workshops and retreats in Nordic and Baltic countries.
Lampela works at the director of the Open Campus of the University of the Arts Helsinki, the unit which focuses on continuous learning and work life studies. She is a member of the board of the University of the Arts in the four-year period 2022–2025. Lampela is the founder and the head of the steering group of the biennial Doctors in Performance Festival Conference, DIP (Helsinki 2014, Dublin 2016, Vilnius 2018, Tallinn 2021, London 2023, Helsinki 2025).
Pianist, doctor of music and researcher Anu Lampela is a versatile actor in the art world. She as the director of the Open Campus at the University of the Arts Helsinki.
As an artist-researcher Lampela has studied recently artisthood, relationship with the musical work, relationship with the audience, piano practicing, presence, now-moment, Karol Szymanowski's piano music, playing orientation and physicality. Together with the actor-researcher Jussi Lehtonen, Lampela has studied the mutual collisions between different art fields and between the art institution and actors outside of it; this study suggests development possibilities of interdisciplinary pedagogy. Lampela also studies high quality pianistic pedagogy together with professor Juha Ojala and pianist-pedagogue Niklas Pokki.
Between the years 2015–2020, Lampela was a member of the multidisciplinary research collective Silence Ensemble (dancer Kirsi Heimonen, visual artist Petri Kaverma, pianist AL). The group developed collaborative artistic research methods and further utilized the outcomes in their own artistic fields.
During the years 2009–2015, the program Open Artist & Dear Audience, organized by Lampela, operates with projects between the artist and the audience, aiming to open up the artist's work and artistic processes as well as to bring the audiences closer to the artist. For twenty years, Lampela has been collecting autoethnographic material from her own piano practice bringing the pain points of the Western art music tradition to the general discussion through artistic research.
