about

SHORT WORK STATEMENT

There are three central modes to my creative output - visual, editorial, and educational.

My visual work consists primarily of drawing, painting, and sculpture. My writing has taken many forms, but I am primarily an essayist. Finally, I am a STEAM educator working at the university and community levels. All of this work is rooted in the ecological imagination. Read on for more specifics about each type of work.

In my 2D and 3D work, the ecological imagination acts as a hybrid zone with porous margins. This allows scientific observation to blend with intuitive leaps of logic and storytelling. My work is influenced by natural history, art history, literature, and eco-theory. I employ a fractured, fairy-tale type of logic to explore the stories we tell about nature, interspecies connection, hybridization, and transformation.

My eco-arts writing stems from a similar place. I am trained as a political journalist and spent a decade working as a daily news reporter. That time was an influential training ground for how to think, research, and develop a narrative. Now, I primarily write creative nonfiction grounded in art, climate change, species loss, and the related issues of misogyny, racism, and classism.

BIOGRAPHY

Lauren Levato Coyne (she/they) is a queer artist, writer, and STEAM educator.

Her paintings, drawings, and sculptures have been exhibited widely in print as well as galleries and museums. Her exhibition history includes the Chicago Cultural Center, Cranbrook Art Museum, Shelburne Museum, The International Museum of Surgical Science, Hashimoto Contemporary, Wasserman Projects, Audubon Magazine, Denver Quarterly, and more. She has received grants and fellowships from Cranbrook Academy of Art, Chicago Cultural Council, Massachusetts Cultural Council, Ragdale, Taconic Foundation, and others.

Levato Coyne publishes often and her writing appears regularly in the Boston Art Review, Berkshire Eagle, and International Sculpture Magazine. In 2022, critic and author of Glitch Feminism Legacy Russell awarded Levato Coyne's writing the Toni Beauchamp Prize in Critical Art Writing. Her winning essay “Queer Elegies and Climate Mourning: Marc Swanson’s Memorial to Ice at the Dead Deer Disco" appeared in the Summer/Fall 2023 issue of Gulf Coast Journal. Her writing has received awards from the Rabkin Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center, and others.

Levato Coyne has been a visiting artist or visiting critic at The Clark Art Institute, The Field Museum, Georgia State University, Rhode Island School of Design, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and University of Wisconsin among others. She currently teaches two courses of her own design at Williams College, the Drawing Science and the Writing Science Studio Labs. Additionally, she is a STEAM educator through Community Access to the Arts, a community arts organization for artists living with disabilities.

Levato Coyne earned an MFA in painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art. She holds undergraduate degrees in professional writing; literature; and gender and ethnic studies from Purdue University and a certificate in political journalism from Georgetown University.