Lauren Henschel (b.1992) is a visual artist working primarily in digital video editing, hand-processed 16mm film and installation work with a strong educational background in both historical documentary traditions as well as in experimental and contemporary genres. Her work elicits questions around guilt, illness and disability while seeking to defy an audience’s expectations about the experience of inhabiting a body. Her work has been displayed at numerous venues, 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 as well as in the History department at Duke. 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 fourth 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.