Lauren Bjelde

Lauren Bjelde was born in 1989 in Modesto, California. Her cross-disciplinary work interrogates the human experience cross-culturally, exploring the variety of ways we have lived and expressed ourselves through time and space. She works in a wide breadth of media, conveying relationships between cultures, myths, events, and traditions through music, drawings, paintings, and metal sculpture. In 2013, she received her Bachelors of Arts in the Fine Arts with a Minor in Anthropology at San Francisco State University.

Bjelde performs as a singer frequently in San Francisco, with her gypsy jazz band, Royal Jelly. Many of the lyrics from her music make their way into the steel and onto the canvas. She has been included in various exhibitions including “Katadrom” at the Young Photographer’s Institute in Istanbul, Turkey in 2012. She has also participated in the Zero1 Arts and Technology Festival in 2011 in a unique collaboration with UC Berkeley’s Applied Material’s Lab, where she presented conceptual applications for emerging technologies. Currently, Bjelde is attending San Jose State University’s Applied Anthropology Graduate Program to begin projects in nautical archaeology and develop others combining public art and visual anthropology.