The Glasgow School of Art

Lauren Dyer Amazeen 
'Art Performance' watch video

Lauren Dyer Amazeen has spent 25 years working with and writing about contemporary artists, many whose work is experimental and sometimes groundbreaking. In the late 1980's she worked with the founders of what was to become ZKM (centre for art and media technology) in Karlsruhe, Germany, to design a model for bringing artists and technologies together, curating their first video exhibition Soul Search. In 1997 she founded Vanguard Visions, a small non-profit company that helps contemporary artists with special projects of an experimental nature, but during most of the 1990's - in the middle of the so-called 'culture wars' - she was Director of The Kitchen, the legendary centre for video, music, dance, performance, film and literature in New York City. Focusing on some of the projects she developed, Lauren will discuss parts of The Kitchen's rich history as an 'artist-centric' organisation founded by two European avant-garde artists in the early 1970's.

Educated at Columbia University in New York, Radcliffe College (Cambridge, MA), Bennington College and the School of International Studies in Vermont, Lauren Dyer Amazeen lives and works in Stockholm and Glasgow. Her publications include: The Kitchen Video Collection: Two decades of the Video Vanguard (1996); and The Kitchen Turns 20 (1992). Over the past 8 years she has worked as a correspondent for the Swedish Bulletin, Tema Celeste, and Crawford fashion magazine and, in the past, Lauren has also performed significant advisory roles for private and public bodies concerned with visual and digital arts in New York. She is currently a reviewer for Artforum, guest writer for Paletten, the contemporary Swedish arts journal, and a Board member of CCA, Glasgow.

Hosted by The School of Fine Art, The Friday Event Lecture Series is The Glasgow School of Art's flagship public lecture series, and brings major international speakers (including artists, architects, designers, historians and cultural theorists) to the city of Glasgow.