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Biography

Laurel V. McLaughlin (she/her/hers) is a curator, art historian, writer, and educator whose research and writing explores research-based sculpture, installation, new media, and social practice works. McLaughlin holds a BA in English and Art History from Wake Forest University and MAs from The Courtauld Institute of Art and Bryn Mawr College. She is a Curator and the Director of Collective Futures Fund at Tufts University Art Galleries and completing her PhD at Bryn Mawr, writing a dissertation concerning performative migratory aesthetics.

McLaughlin’s interdisciplinary research incorporating performance studies, art history, and cultural studies, has been supported by a 2020–2021 Luce/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship in American Art, as well as a 2021–2022 Bryn Mawr College Areté Fund Grant and Dean’s Fellowship Awards. She has shared her scholarly and curatorial work in conferences ranging from Performance Studies International, Calgary; the Universities Art Association of Canada Conference, Toronto and Montreal; the Berkeley Film & Media Studies Graduate Conference, San Francisco; the Philadelphia Avant-Garde Studies Consortium, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; the College Art Association, New York; the Midwest Art Historical Society Annual Conference, Cincinnati; and the Association of the Study of the Arts of the Present, Hong Kong, among others. Her research, critical art writing, and curatorial work has appeared in Art Papers, ASAP/J, Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, BOMB Magazine, BIG WINDOW, The Brooklyn Rail, C Magazine, Contact Quarterly, Women & Performance, Performa Magazine, Performance Research, PARtake, and Te Magazine, alongside other publications. Forthcoming writing from McLaughlin will be featured in the edited volumes Bare Bodies—Thresholding Life, edited by Mariella Griel and published by De Gruyter GmbH; The Borders of Art, co-edited by Dina Ramadan and Sarah Rogers and published by Rowman & Littlefield; and Women’s Innovations in Theatre, Dance, and Performance series, Volume 1: Performers, co-edited by Wendy Arons, Melissa Blanco Borelli, and Elizabeth W. Son and published by Bloomsbury. She is co-editing a multidisciplinary reader, “Live” Art on Campus and Beyond: Tania El Khoury’s Collaborative Knowledge Production, with Carrie Robbins to be published with Amherst College Press in 2023. She has written catalog essays and exhibition texts on the work of Rami George, Ilana Harris-Babou, Carolina Caycedo, Baseera Khan, Emily Jacir, Tsedaye Makonnen, Dawit L. Petros, Emilio Rojas, and Bergman & Salinas.

McLaughlin has organized exhibitions and programming with artist collectives Vox Populi, FJORD, AUTOMAT, after/time, in addition to non-profit organizations, museum institutions, and collegiate galleries such as Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; the University of Pennsylvania in collaboration with the Arthur Ross Gallery and the ICA Philadelphia; the Center for Contemporary Art & Culture of the Pacific Northwest College of Art; and Artspace New Haven in collaboration with the Yale University Art Gallery. Notably, she organized the traveling 2021–2023 survey Emilio Rojas: tracing a wound through my body (originating at Lafayette College Art Galleries, PA, followed by venues Emerson Contemporary, MA; Usdan Gallery, Bennington College, VT; and the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, NC), and she is currently organizing the Terra Foundation-funded symposium Magical Thinking at MASS MoCA and conducting research for a forthcoming exhibition funded by a 2022 Andy Warhol Curatorial Research Fellowship.

CV available upon request.

Headshot image credit: Sam Gehrke 

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