Lauren Gabrielle Fournier (b. 1989, Regina/Treaty 4 Territory, Saskatchewan) is a curator, writer, artist, and scholar of experimental feminist art, literary, and theoretical practices. She works across film, video, performance, sound, music composition, and experimental writing to create cross-disciplinary work. Now based in Toronto, Fournier is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at York University, where she is completing a SSHRC-funded dissertation on “auto-theory” as a post-1960s mode of feminist practice across media. Her research is grounded in the intersections of art history, philosophy, literature, gender and sexuality studies, and contemporary art. Fournier holds a BA in Fine Arts from the University of Regina (2010) and an MA in English from Simon Fraser University (2012). She has worked as a frontline mental health and harm reduction worker, and she is actively engaged in bridging social work with her academic and artistic practices. Her commitment to mental health, class and racial justice, trauma, and addictions advocacy shapes her work.
Fournier is the creator of Fermenting Feminism (Berlin: Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology) and Self Care for Skeptics, and is the Associate Editor of Kapsula Magazine, a multimedia platform for experimental, web-based approaches to contemporary art writing and criticism. She is on the programming committee of the Feminist Art Conference (since 2014) and is a Graduate Associate on the Executive Committee for the Centre for Feminist Research/Le centre de recherches féministes. She has served on the Board of Directors of Trinity Square Video and has worked at artist-run centres across Canada, including VIVO Media Arts Centre and Gallery TPW.
Fournier’s writing has been published in Canadian Art, Magenta, Contemporary Women’s Writing, Comparative Media Arts Journal, Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies, Canadian Journal of Woman Studies, and West Coast Line, and in the edited collections Desire Change: Contemporary Feminist Art in Canada (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017) and Feminist Food Studies: Exploring Intersectionality (Women’s Press, forthcoming). Recent curatorial projects include The Sustenance Rite (Blackwood Gallery), Fermenting Feminism (Critical Distance, Front/Space, Büro BDP), and Out of Repetition, Difference (Zalucky Contemporary). Her art has been exhibited in galleries, artist-run centres, and screenings across Canada, the United States, and Europe.