Dr. Laurel Jay Carpenter is a visual art performer, investigating longing and intimacy, while troubling subjectivity, in her durational live works. For over twenty-five years, she has exhibited in New York at venues including Exit Art, The Knitting Factory, Performance Space 122, Judson Church House, SOHO20 and Brooklyn’s Borough Hall. Laurel has been a fellow and invited artist at the MacDowell residency, CAOS Art Center in Italy, and for three seasons at the Salem2Salem US/German artist exchange. Laurel has also presented solo work internationally at the NMAC Foundation in Spain; with Wooloo Productions, the Hebbel Theatre and Schloss Salem in Germany; at the PAB and PAO Performance Festivals in Norway; the Sofia Underground Performance Festival in Bulgaria; the Festival of Contemporary Art in Terni, Italy, and as part of the 2007 Venice Biennale.

Laurel is honored to have been a member of the Independent Performance Group, founded by Marina Abramović as an early incarnation of her institute to support durational methods across disciplines. In 2016, Laurel stepped down from her tenure as Associate Professor of Art at Alfred University to complete a transnational, practice-based PhD as a means to contextualize and disseminate an intersectional feminist, new materialist and performative research methodology as evidenced within her process of making. In our current era of kyriarchy, slow, sensing and embodied practices are crucial in activating modes of resistance, undoing dominance. Laurel’s expertise is in turning situated knowledge of socio-political trends into visual and poetic, thereby personally accessible, performances. She continues to work between the US and UK.