VAST 310 SU03U: Visual Arts: Special Topics

Lauren Marsden is a Trinidadian-Canadian artist, teacher, and editor. Her work studies the nature of performance and explores the ways a performative act can be documented and re-circulated, often in relation to contentious and complex sites and landscapes. She experiments with directorial and script-writing techniques that interweave performance and site, allowing one to inform the other within the production of films, videos, gifs, and photographs. At the core of her practice is a fascination with collaboration and improvisation across disciplines, and she has worked with many creative professionals, including actors, dancers, voice artists, costume makers, a court illustrator, a police sketch artist­, and an auctioneer. She has presented her work at galleries and film festivals in Canada, the United States, Italy, Mexico, and Trinidad & Tobago. She holds an MFA from the California College of the Arts and currently teaches at Simon Fraser University and Emily Carr University of Art + Design in the fields of media arts, performance art, and critical writing. She is the editor of Decoy Magazine, an arts publication based in Vancouver, BC.