Helen Mirra's areas of interest are sati (awareness) within somatics, sila (ethics) in ecology, and the apparent edges of disciplines as actual centers of integrated experience. She has been a guest of the DAAD Kunstlerprogramm in Berlin, the Laurenz Haus in Basel, IASPIS in Stockholm, and OCA in Oslo; a fellow at the MacDowell Colony and Civitella Ranieri; and artist-in-residence with the Consortium of the Arts at the University of California at Berkeley, the Center for Book Arts at Mills College, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. She has received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, the Driehaus Foundation, and Artadia. She was a Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University and a Senior Lecturer at the University of Chicago with the Committees of Visual Art and Cinema & Media Studies. She has had some other jobs also: as a waiter, a bread baker, a pre-press operator, a museum preparator, a library clerk, a postal carrier. She doesn't identify with her legal name; some people call her Hm (pronounced either way) and some people call her Kombu. She is autistic, and 167cm in height. Since 2008 her practice has been contingent with walking.