Assistant Professor
About
Lauren Williams (she/they) is a Detroit-based designer, researcher and educator. They work with visual and interactive media to understand, critique, and reimagine the ways social and economic systems distribute and exercise power over Black life and death.
Through their creative practice and research, Lauren often investigates Blackness, identity, bodiliness, and social fictions to examine how racism is felt, embodied, and embedded into institutions. Themes of trust and the transformations enabled by social engagement shape both her approaches—collaboration, facilitation, collective production—and the questions she examines surrounding power and oppression, social relations, and social movements. She has taught design + interdisciplinary studios and intensives at the College for Creative Studies, ArtCenter College of Design, CalArts and elsewhere.
In the past, she has managed programs and policy aimed at cultivating economic justice at Prosperity Now in DC. Going forward, she's finding ways to align her capacities with revolutionary movements that build toward different socioeconomic systems entirely and usher in new dimensions of power and freedom altogether.
