RA+DI Entrepreneurial Resident Lauren Shapiro discusses extending her artistic practice into the realm of gallery-level design with Neil Ramsay, Creative Economist, and RA+DI Research Associate.

Lauren Shapiro lives and works in Miami, Florida. Shapiro received a Master’s degree in Fine Arts from the University of Miami in Ceramics (2016) and a BFA from Florida Atlantic University (2009). Her work experiments with art’s possibility to affect change and cultivate a broad awareness of our environment. Working alongside ecologists to understand and narrate nature, she merges craft, science, and technology to document disappearing ecosystems as sculptural ceramic archives. Selected solo exhibitions include “Future Pacific” (2021) at Bakehouse Art Complex in Miami, Florida, “Garden Portals” (2021) at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, in Miami, Florida, and “Fragile Terrains” (2018), at Bianca Boekel Galeria, in São Paulo, Brazil. Selected group exhibitions include “Design Miami,” (2021) with Todd Merrill Studio in Miami Beach, Florida, “Powder Hounds” (2020) at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Aspen, Colorado, and “Projektraum M54” (2017) in Basel, Switzerland. Shapiro received awards from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts (2019), Knight Foundation (2020), Awesome Foundation (2020), Oolite Arts (2020), Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, and is currently artist-in-residence for a National Science Foundation grant awarded to marine ecologists at California State University, Northridge. Her work is in the Jorge M. Perez Collection.