Lisa Jane Persky

Lisa Jane Persky is an American actress, journalist, author, artist, and photographer whose career spans stage, film, television, and print media. She grew up in New York City's Greenwich Village, at 87 Christopher Street, a building whose notable tenants included playwright H.M. Koutoukas and Yoko Ono. Following her parents' divorce, her father, Mordecai (Mort) Persky, married novelist Judith Rossner, author of Looking for Mr. Goodbar, while her mother, Jane Holley Persky, married classical violinist Vladimir Weisman. Persky attended P.S. 41 for elementary school and went on to the High School of Art and Design, where she studied graphic design.

Her acting career began immediately after high school, when her neighbor Koutoukas, a playwright, cast her in a role he had written specifically for her. She played Cordelia Wells, The World's Most Perfect Teenager, in Grandmother Is in the Strawberry Patch, produced at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, for a salary of $25 per week. The production was the first of several collaborations between Persky and Koutoukas. In 1976, she performed as Mary-Eleanor in Tom Eyen's Women Behind Bars, directed by Ron Link and starring Divine. Her Broadway career includes a 1982 appearance in Steaming. Her stage work in Los Angeles earned her the Drama-Logue and LA Weekly Theater awards for Best Actress for Mayo Simon's These Men, performed at the Los Angeles Actors Theatre Company, and for Hearts on Fire at the Odyssey. She also received a Drama Critics Circle award nomination for Outstanding Performance for These Men.

Persky's film career began with a supporting role in The Great Santini (1979), in which she played the daughter of Robert Duvall's character. She has since appeared in more than two dozen films, including American Pop, The Cotton Club, Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), The Big Easy, When Harry Met Sally... (1989), and Coneheads. In Destiny Turns on the Radio (1995), her character Katrina gave actor and director Quentin Tarantino his first on-screen kiss. In 2013, she appeared in I Am Divine, Jeffrey Schwarz's documentary about the actor Divine.

Her television work includes a recurring role on Private Eye and appearances on NYPD Blue, The X-Files, King of the Hill, E/R, and The Golden Girls, among many others. She has also appeared in made-for-TV movies including Meat Loaf: To Hell and Back and KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park.

An early participant in the CBGB music scene, Persky was a founding staff member of New York Rocker magazine in the late 1970s, where she worked as a writer and photojournalist documenting the punk and new wave movement. She returned to that subject at the New York Rockers panel at the 2012 EMP Pop Conference. As a journalist, her work has appeared in publications including Fortean Times and LA Weekly. In 2010, she became a founding editor and art director of the Los Angeles Review of Books, a position she held until December 2012. Her fiction has been published in BOMB and Eclectica magazines, and she was among 30 writers selected for the anthology Eclectica: Best Fiction Vol. 1, where she was credited as Eljay Persky.

Persky's photography has appeared in magazines including Mojo, Q, and Uncut, and in books such as Gary Valentine's memoir New York Rocker: My Life in The Blank Generation, Punk: The Whole Story, and Lance Out Loud, to which she also contributed an essay. Her collage work has been published in the Los Angeles Times and LA Style, and earned her an Award for Design Excellence from Print magazine. In 2008, she co-produced and curated Los Angeles Loteria: An Exploration of Identity, an edition of prints marking the 40th anniversary of Aardvark Letterpress. In 2012, she contributed the foreword to the catalog for photographer Bobby Grossman's exhibit Low Fidelity - The Photos of Bobby Grossman.

Persky was the subject of the Blondie song (I'm Always Touched by Your) Presence, Dear, written by Gary Valentine, the band's bassist at the time and her then-boyfriend. She married music historian Andy Zax on January 19, 2008; Zax was a former co-star of the Comedy Central game show Beat the Geeks. Beginning in 2009, Persky made regular appearances on The Best Show on WFMU radio program, both as a caller and as an in-studio guest, and she has been a semi-regular on the Life Elsewhere program on WMNF in Tampa, Florida.