Therese Lahaie studied fine art and biology at Emmanuel College in Boston, in preparation for a career in medical illustration.  She had selected this course of study as the result of information about "Careers for Artists" presented to her by her father. During her junior year abroad in London, however, she was so moved by the medieval stained glass windows in the cathedrals of Europe that she reconsidered her career as an anatomist/ illustrator.  As soon as she graduated from Emmanuel, she went up the street to the Massachusetts College of Art to study glass sculpture and has never looked back.
           
After moving to the Bay Area in 1987 her work became dominated by images related to navigation.  For this series, she fabricated a series of illuminated viewer activated rocking "buoy" sculptures.  A sensor inside the sculpture detects the viewer and triggers a vigorous rocking and spinning movement.

In preparation for an exhibition at the M.I.T. Museum in Boston, titled "Glass, Linking Art and Science" she began synthesizing her work with glass and the kinetic movement inspired by the buoy sculptures. In this series titled “Breathing Lessons”, light is projected through slowly moving glass. The shadows cast by the glass expand and contract rhythmically drifting in and out of focus as the glass is pushed and released by a low rpm motor.

Her kinetic sculpture was included in the highly praised 2003 exhibition The Invisible Thread at the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art in New York.  The exhibition explored the links between Buddhist perspectives and contemporary art over the last 50 years. In 2006 she received a Djerassi Resident Artist Fellowship, in Woodside, CA.  Her second solo show at Heller Gallery, NYC, NY was in the spring of 2007.   In the fall of 2007 she will be a senior lecturer at California College of the Arts.