A graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and the Juilliard School, Michael Lasater worked as a professional trombonist for more than a decade with ensembles including the Aspen Festival Orchestra, United States Military Academy Band - West Point, Metropolitan Opera, Bolshoi Opera of Moscow, New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, Tanglewood Fellowship Orchestra/Boston Symphony Orchestra, National Orchestral Association, and Spoleto Festival Orchestra, Italy. Conductors included James Levine, Rafael Kubelik, Sixten Ehrling, James Conlon, Walter Susskind, Leonard Slatkin, Darius Milhaud, and Seiji Ozawa.
His degrees in filmmaking and communication are from Syracuse University. He is the creator of several documentaries on subjects in poetry, music, and literature, with broadcast and distribution by the National Educational Television Association/PBS, Barr Films, Kentucky Educational Television, and Coronet Film & Video. His work has won awards from the American Film Festival, San Francisco International Film Festival, International Film and Television Festival of New York, National Monitor Awards of New York, and U.S. Film and Video Festival, Chicago.
His gallery work in video is in museum and private collections, and has appeared in well over one hundred solo, invitational and juried exhibitions. Venues include La Mama, New York; Long-Sharp Gallery, Indianapolis/New York; Hun Gallery, New York; Art in General, New York; Oerebro International Videoart Festival, Sweden; artvideoKÖLN; Los Angeles Center for Contemporary Art; South Bend Museum of Art; Kansas City Artists Coalition; Union Street Gallery, Chicago; Around the Coyote Gallery, Chicago; California Museum of Photography; Athens Institute for Contemporary Art; Dallas Center for Contemporary Art; and Target Gallery.
He has published poetry in Heartland!; Kansas Time + Place; and The Heartland Review, where he is the winner of the 2019 Joy Bale Boone Poetry Prize. His poems appear in the 2019 chapbook of ekphrastic poetry published by the South Bend Museum of Art.