Lauren Mitzelfelt (she/they) is a working multimedia artist and designer located in Los Angeles. Creating work in both photographic and illustrative means, she takes particular interest in stories of interpersonal connection through an expressionist lens of gender and sexuality.
I will graduate in 2023 from Loyola Marymount University with a Bachelor’s in Fine Art (Graphic Design) and minor degree in Women’s and Gender Studies, and in the meantime I have enjoyed extracurricular experience in both commercial photo design work and inclusions in fine art galleries. One significant memory is my inclusion in I AM HERE AND SOMEWHERE ELSE ENTIRELY, a trio exhibition that ran in October of 2022 in the Thomas P. Kelly Gallery alongside my cohorts Lauren Cassiano and Will Roberts. The show explored themes of bodily discomfort and examined the human body as an object. My various sculptural, graphic, and illustrated works in I AM HERE served as a radical representation of physical detachment, inviting our audience to rework the logic of the body as “home” and question the placement of self in its physicality.
I find my work is inspired by familial history and the relationships I share in daily, as well as my own gender experience. I think a lot about the people around me, about dialogue shared, and about stories passed down when creating my work. I want to express a new language of emotional literacy as something as intelligence, rather than a feminine weakness, as it has been historically recalled across various Western cultures. Hyperawareness and constant re-reflection are both important to my practice. I repeatedly ask myself then try to answer: Why are people this way?
