An artist by trade, Laureen Andalib (b. San Francisco, 1995) is an award-winning director and strategist passionate about human dignity, empowerment, and revival across cultures and publics.

Story

Andalib was born in the fourth Mission District of the U.S. on Ohloné and Mexican land, on César Chávez and Guerrero Street— where the Chicano Civil Rights, Labor, and murales feministas movements began. The Lexington Club (America’s first lesbian bar), St. Luke’s Hospital, and Laguna Dolores— vital social, public, and natural recourses of the district, and of greater San Francisco— were all extracted and demolished by dot com developers while her family lived there.

From 2018 to 2022, Andalib returned to San Francisco to reverse continued inequities in the Mission through public service and education. Through her involvement with the So’gorea Te Ohloné Land Trust, Rebuilding Together San Francisco, and Center for ArtEsteem Oakland, she took part in community rehabilitation and healing modalities to challenge systemic inequities such as low-income incarceration, gentrification, and intergenerational trauma amongst displaced QTPOCIA+ communities.

Having grown up in a first and second-generation household, Andalib’s practice is informed by her parents’ experiences as refugees and veterans of the Bangladeshi genocide and Liberation War of 1971. She is also the granddaughter of Nurul Islam Chaudhury, Bangladesh’s first diplomat to the U.S. after independence, and descendant of Iranian religious scholar and philosopher, Mu'in al-Din Chishti, renowned for bringing soma (Persian: sama-zen), or body-centered movement meditations to the Indian subcontinent— most-recognized by Sufi dancers.

Exhibitions

Andalib is most known for her multidisciplinary exhibitions, “SimulaKruma: Architecture, Rehabilitation, and Memory in Eastern Europe” (2015), which captured her experiences as a UN responder during the Syrian Refugee Crisis in coinciding areas of displacement with the Bosnian genocide of 1995; as well as “The Intrinsic Code of Language: Lessons of the Silk Road” (2016), a live, global photography series on fashion colonization, censorship, and cultural economies of consumption. Thereafter, she received the U.S. Humanities Prize from Stanford University in 2016, and U.S. Rhodes Scholar nomination from the University of Oxford in 2017.

Academia

Andalib studied and received her BFA from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York in 2017, and MDes from Harvard University Graduate School of Design in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2023.

Andalib’s BFA thesis, “Bodies, Buildings, and Borders” (2017), compares degrading building conditions and socio-climate risks in her ancestral home in Rangpur, and the Rana Plaza building collapse of 2015 in Dhaka. Her thesis received the David R. Bean Prize and Thesis Memorial Prize from Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning.

Her MDes graduating project, “Somatics for the Built and Natural World and Everything In-Between” (2023) culminates as a children’s card game and pop-up classroom for under-served regions of the Global South, based on real-time illustrations and interviews from around the world— and seeks to create access to healing practices and pedagogies around socioclimate impact. The project was sparked by her community work on HIV/AIDS and domestic violence in Oyugis, Kenya from 2022-23, in conjunction with MIT Design Lab and the Society Empowerment Project of Kenya (SEP).

Studio Somatics (2022 - Present)

Today, her most recent creative venture start-up, Studio Somatics, continues to engage ritual and performance, sensory ethnography, and somatic collisions to address trauma and liberation, lost legacies, and revival. By interrogating relationships between material, movement, psyche, and land— Andalib’s practice moves towards desires for world-building and reconciliation through self-determination and collective healing.

In her free time, Andalib loves nature and tea ceremonies, exploring new healing modalities, cooking, dancing, and traveling.

She is currently based in New York, NY.