Lauren Fournier grew up in Regina, Saskatchewan and is now based in Toronto. She is a writer, curator, theorist, and artist who works across media. Her art practice, academic research, and curatorial work are grounded in “auto-theory” as a contemporary mode of feminist practice, and she often works between performance for the camera, sound, and experimental writing to create cross-disciplinary feminist work.

She has worked as a frontline mental health and harm reduction worker, and her commitment to mental health, community health, trauma, and addictions advocacy shapes her artistic and academic work. She returns to topics of mental health, social work, class, settler-colonialism, religion, spirituality, aesthetics, witchcraft, philosophy, and sexuality in her work, approaching these through frameworks shaped by intersectional, trans-inclusive feminisms. Her first novel, an expanded writing project entitled Feminist Father Worship, is forthcoming 2019.

Lauren is a PhD candidate in English at York University, where she writes on “auto-theory” as contemporary feminist practice, focusing on the work of Adrian Piper, Chris Kraus, and Maggie Nelson, amongst others. She holds a BA in Arts & Culture from the University of Regina and an MA in English from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, where she focused on feminist performance theory, contemporary art history, and intermedia studio practice.

She is active in artist-run culture and feminist organizing, having served on the programming committee of the Feminist Art Conference (2014-present), the Board of Directors of Trinity Square Video (2015-16), the Membership and Events Committee of Trinity Square Video (2015-16), and the Executive Committee of the Centre for Feminist Research (2017-present). She has worked and interned at such spaces as Gallery TPW, gallerywest, VIVO Media Arts Centre, and the Dunlop, and has been written exhibition essays for the Organization of Saskatchewan Arts Councils.

Her videos have been screened in galleries, artist-run centres, and alternative spaces across Canada, the United States, and Europe. Her writing has been published in Canadian Art, Magenta, Kapsula, Comparative Media Arts Journal, Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies, Contemporary Women’s Writing, West Coast Line, and Desire Change: Contemporary Feminist Art in Canada. Recent curatorial projects include The Sustenance Rite (Blackwood Gallery), Fermenting Feminism (Critical Distance, Front/Space, Büro BDP), and Out of Repetition, Difference (Zalucky Contemporary).