Lauren R. O’Connell is curator of contemporary art at Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (SMoCA). 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. Over her ten-year curating practice, she has curated and organized numerous solo exhibitions with artists including Tarek Atoui, Kristin Bauer, Diedrick Brackens, Mimi O Chun, Will Brown (collective), Martin Soto Climent, Otobong Nkanga, Jean Shin, and Qiu Zhijie. 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 curated group exhibitions including Forever Becoming: Young Phoenix Artists (2021) and Unapologetic: All Women, All Year (2020). Previously, O’Connell worked at UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), where she organized the inaugural exhibition and publication Architecture of Life (2016) that included over 90 artists and approximately 300 objects with former director and chief curator Lawrence Rinder. O’Connell has written for exhibition publications including New Time: Art & Feminism in the 21st Century (BAMPFA, 2021) and Harvey Quaytman: Against the Static (University of California Press, 2018), as well as national journals including New American Paintings and Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Art. Her upcoming curatorial projects include a solo exhibition with international artist Leonor Antunes (2022), a major group exhibition Language in Times of Miscommunication (2023), and a post-humous retrospective on color field painter Dorothy Fratt (2023).