Lauren Williams (she/they) is a Detroit-based designer, researcher and educator. They work with visual and interactive media to understand, critique, and reimagine the ways social and economic systems distribute and exercise power over Black life and death.

Through her creative practice and research, Lauren often investigates social fictions to examine how racism and other forms of oppression are felt, embodied, and embedded into institutions. Themes of trust and the transformations enabled by social engagement shape both their approaches—collaboration, facilitation, collective production—and the questions they examine surrounding power and oppression, social relations, and social movements. Other times, Lauren’s work imagines otherwise: ideating and rendering other possible worlds by crafting objects, narratives and experiences that help us prefigure liberated futures.

Prior to joining LibGen, Lauren was an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan’s Taubman School of Architecture and Urban Planning + the Digital Studies Institute. She has taught design + interdisciplinary studios and intensives at the College for Creative Studies, ArtCenter College of Design, CalArts and elsewhere. In the past, they managed programs and policy aimed at cultivating economic justice at Prosperity Now in DC. Going forward, she’s finding ways to align her capacities with revolutionary movements that build toward different socioeconomic systems entirely and usher in new dimensions of power and freedom altogether.