Lauren Williams is a Detroit-based designer, researcher, writer, and educator working with visual and interactive media to understand, critique, and reimagine how social and economic systems distribute and exercise power. Their recent work titled Making Room for Abolition included an experiential installation of a living room from a Detroit (and world) without police and prisons.
Her work emerges from both a deep disappointment with the ways we wield and distribute power and a persistent optimism in people’s capacity to creatively reimagine and redistribute power in more equitable ways. They often investigate Blackness, identity, bodiliness, and social fictions to examine how racialized oppression and freedom is felt, embodied, and embedded into institutions.
Williams has taught design and interdisciplinary studios and intensives at the College for Creative Studies (CCS), where she was a teaching fellow from 2019-2021; ArtCenter College of Design; and CalArts. She has also been a guest lecturer and critic at many institutions, including Taubman College.
