Lauren R. O’Connell is curator of contemporary art at Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (SMoCA). Her most recent projects include Diedrick Brackens: ark of bulrushes (2021), presenting a new series of large-scale weavings and premiering the artist's woven sculptures and performative photographs, and Mimi O Chun: It's all cake (2021), the artist's first solo museum exhibition of soft sculptures made since the onset of the pandemic. While at SMoCA, she has also organized a variety of exhibitions, including Forever Becoming: Young Phoenix Artists (2021), Unapologetic: All Women, All Year (2020), and Divergent Materiality: Contemporary Glass Art (2019). O'Connell's upcoming projects include the major group exhibition Language in Times of Miscommunication (2023), featuring text-based artwork made starting in 2016 that question how narratives are created, interpreted, and, often, miscommunicated, and a post-humous retrospective on color field painter Dorothy Fratt (2023).

Previously, O’Connell worked independently and held curatorial positions at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), where she helped organized the inaugural exhibition Architecture of Life (2016) with Lawrence Rinder and numerous MATRIX exhibitions (2013-2017) with Apsara DiQuinzio. In addition to curating, O'Connell is adjunct faculty in the School of Art at Arizona State University. In 2019, she was invited to create the seminar course “Curating the Contemporary,” the first curatorial class of its kind presented by the University.

O’Connell has worked with numerous artists on new projects and commissions including Tarek Atoui, Kristin Bauer, Diedrick Brackens, Will Brown (collective), Martin Soto Climent, Mimi O Chun, Otobong Nkanga, Jean Shin, and Qiu Zhijie. She received a M.A. in Curatorial Practice from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco and a B.A. in Classics and Art History from the University of Arizona, Tucson.