About Laurie Van Wieren

Bio

Laurie Van Wieren (she/her) grew up on the west side of Chicago and moved to Minneapolis where she fell in with a pack of dance and art makers. Van Wieren has created solo, ensemble, and site-specific works throughout the Twin Cities with many collaborators. This work has been presented at the Walker Art Center, The Southern Theater, Hennepin Center for the Arts, Bryant Lake Bowl Theater, The O’Shaughnessy, Carlton College Arena Theater, First Ave, The Fitzgerald Theater, Loring Park, Open Eye Theater, Red Eye Theater,  Lake of the Isles Ice skating rink and Patrick’s Cabaret. Her dances have also been seen in Chicago, Fargo, New York, Potsdam, Germany, and Yaroslavl, Russia. She is an artist advocate and has curated and produced performances at the Southern Theater, Ritz Theater, Soo Visual Art Center, and 9×22 Dance/Lab, the monthly inclusive performance/discussion platform that she created (2003 to 2019). Her work has received awards from the McKnight, Jerome, Bush, and Rockefeller Foundations, National Endowment for the Arts, Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, Minnesota State Arts Board, Sage Cowles Awards for Dance, and an Artists of the Year Award in City Pages.  In 2022 she was in residence at Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography as part of a McKnight Artist Fellowship.

Laurie Van Wieren (she/her) makes dances, researches family archives, maps landscapes, records histories, organizes and moves with objects, creates frameworks, collects imagery, talks to strangers, attends estate sales, imitates others, utilizes chance, follows her intuition, prompts participation, talks with her hands, takes walks, makes lists, loses lists. Using her body, she acknowledges the passing of time, the movement of stories and natural phenomena.