Lauren Cohen is a multidisciplinary artist whose work blends painting, ceramics, installation, and performance to explore power, identity, and theatricality through a distinctly surreal Americana lens. Drawing from her upbringing in Puritan-rooted New England, Cohen stages fictionalized interiors and absurd character tableaux that blur the line between personal history and cultural myth.

Her paintings and sculptures feature distorted domestic symbols—quilted ships, Civil War-era figurines, anthropomorphized ceramic foods that evoke both humor and psychological tension. Recurring motifs such as folk textiles, drag-like personas, and handcrafted props reflect her ongoing interest in performance, repression, and the uncanny logic of inherited belief systems.

Cohen’s lived experience as a cue card girl for Saturday Night Live and a Chelsea Gallerina informs her staged, performative world. These roles become source material for characters that expose power dynamics and the subtle choreography of control, labor, and identity. Without overt labels, her work engages the language of gender performance and codes of behavior, often through comedic artifice.

Rooted in narrative yet resistant to resolution, Cohen’s work constructs theatrical environments where humor and trauma coexist. Through layered references and meticulously staged objects, she examines the quiet violence of domestic life and the surreal elasticity of American cultural memory.