senseofplace LAB is an artistic laboratory that develops projects/works that heighten a ‘sense of place’, usually in collaboration with interdisciplinary partners.  It was founded by Laurie Halsey Brown in San Francisco in 2008 – based on research/art since 2000. Projects/works are created for many audiences: as temporary public/social practice projects, within an art context and in collaboration with – and then placed into – communities. Research and educational components are layered into each project/work. senseofplace LAB seeks to develop projects that heighten a relationship to place in order to facilitate a more meaningful relationship to one’s environment, and to create strategies for people to better communicate the value of their communities.

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Laurie Halsey Brown is the Director/Founder of senseofplace LAB. She received her MFA from California Institute of the Arts. After which, she lived in New York City for ten years before moving to Rotterdam, the Netherlands for five years. She has been living in San Francisco since 2007.

A large scale interdisciplinary piece based on her residency in the World Trade Center was shown at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, NYC in 2001, and her work afterwards has been shown nationally in places such as Exit Art, White Columns and internationally, including creating several large interdisciplinary art projects funded by the Dutch and British government. She has also had video work shown internationally in such venues as the International Film Festival Rotterdam.

She was one of ten finalists for a 2012 Masterminds Grant from SF Weekly: Honoring the Bay Area’s Most Inventive Artists. Her photographs were in an 2011-2012 exhibition in the Bay Area juried by Sandra S. Phillips, Senior Curator of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Drew Johnson, Curator of Photography at the Oakland Museum of California – and won a Jurors Choice Award. She is also included in the 2011-2012 exhibition Before the Fall at the New York State Museum. In 2013, She was nominated for The Present Prize for research-based work and created eight new projects as part of senseofplace LAB.

Brown’s work has been written about in Art in America, and several times in The New York Times, and most recently in SF Weekly, The Bold Italic and KPIX. Her works are part of the permanent collection in the Museum Boijmans, Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and in many private collections. She has been actively involved in guest residencies nationally and internationally including Belfast, N. Ireland; Berlin, Germany; Rotterdam, the Netherlands and in the UK.

She was a faculty member of the New School University, NYC from 1999 to 2012, where she designed and taught an online course titled ‘Interdisciplinary Media and Contemporary Society.’

Laurie Halsey Brown

Artist/Director of senseofplace LAB

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