Taubman College Lauren Williams will join Taubman College as an assistant professor of architecture and digital studies in the fall of 2023. 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.
“My 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. I often investigate Blackness, identity, bodiliness, and social fictions to examine how racialized oppression and freedom is felt, embodied, and embedded into institutions,” said Williams.
“Informed by my experience in policy advocacy, economic justice initiatives, qualitative research, and nonprofit management, I am committed to finding ways for art and design modalities to contribute to discourse in fields where design is not typically given primacy. Artists and designers can offer those fields new ways to pose questions, pursue analysis, and frame representations of knowledge that surpass most people’s surface-level expectations of what visual and aesthetic fields of practice have to offer. As an educator, I seek to help students recognize their power as form-makers to both shape and reflect spaces far beyond their own field of practice.”
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.
