Lauren Henschel

Lauren Henschel is an artist working in the field of experimental documentary. Her work illustrates the trials felt as someone living with multiple auto-immune diseases in an ableist landscape. Lauren employs emulsion manipulation techniques to 16mm film in order to further communicate themes of guilt, illness, and disability.  The first film in her INFUSION SERIES premiered in New York with MONO NO AWARE to an audience of over 2000, and went on to screen internationally at more than 15 festivals, including Carnegie Hall and the Miami Art Museum and has screened at Athens International Film and Video Festival (US), Harkat 16mm Film Festival (Mumbai, India), ANALOGICA (Italy), VASTLAB (US), Process (Riga, Latvia), and more. 

Lauren is currently teaching documentary film in the Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies department and is also the Director of Doc+ at the Center for Documentary Studies. As a professor, she aims to give her students the opportunity to express their research, personal stories, or historical narratives through nontraditional academic mediums such as documentary filmmaking. She is embarking on the fifth year of a pilot program in which students are learning how to create documentary films about the material they are learning in their course, in place of a test or written assignment. Students spend the semester developing a visual grammar for expressing their ideas while learning a highly valuable skill- how to work with images in ethical and technical ways.