about

BRIEF WORK STATEMENT

I am a visual artist working in the biological and geological sciences. I am also a creative non-nonfiction writer working in the eco-arts. My work is rooted in the ecological imagination.

In my paintings, the ecological imagination is a hybrid zone with porous margins allowing scientific observation to blend with intuitive leaps of logic and storytelling. I allow my paintings to wander and make their own sense. My work is influenced by natural history, art history, literature, eco-theory, and my lived experiences as a queer woman. This approach allows me to employ a fractured, fairy-tale type of logic that opens a portal to explore interspecies connection, hybridization, and transformation.

My eco-arts writing stems from a similar place, only with fewer flights of fancy. I am trained as a political journalist and spent a decade working as a daily news reporter. That time was a hugely 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.


BIOGRAPHICAL INFO

Lauren Levato Coyne is a queer artist, writer, and STEAM educator.

Her paintings, drawings, and sculptures have been exhibited widely at galleries, museums, and in print at institutions such as 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, Vermont Studio Center, and others.

Levato Coyne regularly writes reviews and critical essays for international publications. In 2022, Legacy Russell awarded her writing the Toni Beauchamp Prize in Critical Art Writing for her essay “Queer Elegies and Climate Mourning: Marc Swanson’s Memorial to Ice at the Dead Deer Disco."

Levato Coyne has been a visiting artist or visiting critic at The Clark Art Institute, The Field Museum of Natural History, 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 leads the Drawing Science Studio Lab at Williams College and teaches STEAM workshops 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.


RESEARCH AREAS

- more information forthcoming April 2025 -