Lauren Shapiro is a visual artist and environmental advocate who experiments with art's possibility to affect change and cultivate a broad awareness of our environment. Working alongside scientists, architects, and filmmakers to understand and narrate nature, she merges craft, science, and technology to document disappearing ecosystems as sculptural ceramic archives and public art projects.

Born and raised in South Florida, Shapiro is drawn to the precarious fate of the local environment, exploring the systems, patterns and tipping points in nature. Shapiro’s work exists at the intersection of observation and preservation; she studies data from diverse ecological systems and uses casting processes to interpret and archive environmental textures made in clay from plaster and silicone molds.

Lauren Shapiro lives in Miami and has a studio at Bakehouse Art Complex in Miami. She received an MFA in Ceramics from the University of Miami (2016) and a BFA from Florida Atlantic University (2009). Selected solo exhibitions include "Future Pacific'' (2021) at Bakehouse, "Garden Portals" (2021) at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Miami, and "Fragile Terrains'' (2018), at Bianca Boekel Galeria, in São Paulo, Brazil.

Shapiro’s latest work is part of two exhibitions on view at this time. One is "Coral Portal", featuring an immersive experience that showcases a digital archive of the shapes and forms of a endangered coral reef ecosystem, as part of “Phygital Cities of the Future NFT Exhibition" at Madarts_Space, opening Friday night, March 31 in Dania Beach thru April 22. The other is "Montipora and Pocillopora Lamps", ceramic objects that blend form with function and incorporate the photogrammetric data of live coral reefs, at the Jewish Museum of Miami, where she is one of three artists in Environmental Art: Fragile Beauty, on display through April. The museum is in South Beach in a restored historic former synagogue, where the art deco stained glass within inspired her custom pedestal.

Other selected group exhibitions include "Design Miami" (2021) with Todd Merrill Studio in Miami Beach, "Powder Hounds'' (2020) at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Aspen, Colorado, and “Projektraum M54” (2017) in Basel, Switzerland. Shapiro received awards from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts (2019), Knight Foundation (2020), Awesome Foundation (2020), and Oolite Arts (2021), Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, and is currently an artist-in-residence for a National Science Foundation grant awarded to marine ecologists at California State University, Northridge. Her work is in the Jorge M. Perez Collection.