Laura is an award-winning writer, artist, midwife and creative producer working at the intersection of women’s health, feminism, and visual storytelling. Her career has been dedicated to exploring the lived experience and politics of the representation of women’s bodies, from her beginnings as a feminist artist in the 1990s to her current practice in midwifery and Graphic Medicine.
Trained as an artist at the Slade School of Fine Art and as a Fulbright Fellow at Pratt Institute, New York, her work has been widely exhibited and cited in key feminist art histories. This painterly sensibility now shapes her work in graphic narratives and illustration, where richly layered artworks merge with text to explore complex embodied stories and visual identities. Her recent title, A Graphic Guide to Pregnancy and Birth (Icon Books) was created with illustrator and cartoonist Lilly Williams, and extends her pioneering work in visual health communication.
Laura worked as a curator and creative producer in the live art sector for 12 years, founding the company Home Live Art in 1999. She initially used domestic spaces in her own home, and then a range of other site-specific locations in collaboration with major arts and cultural organisations to platform innovative and challenging performance work.
Training to be a midwife in 2013, Laura has gone on to combine healthcare and creative practice to champion women’s voices. She is founder of Maternal Journal, an award-winning global movement supporting mental health through creative journaling, which won the Basil Lee Award for Innovation in Communication, awarded by The Royal Society of Medicine. Other professional roles include as Member of the NMC (Nursing & Midwifery Council) Midwifery Strategic Advisory Group, Chair of Shifrah UK, Culture and Awareness Lead NHS Jewish Staff Network, Editorial Board of the Practising Midwife Journal and Council member of The Jewish Medical Association.
She is winner of a JKP Writing Prize, ‘Stories of Resistance’, an Arts Council England ‘Develop Your Creative Practice’ Award and a JLF ‘Genesis’ Emerging Writers Fellowship and has contributed to recent titles such as An Artist and a Mother (Demeter Press), and Mothering: A Performance (Routledge).
She is currently working on a graphic memoir, Scar Tissue: a vivid, urgent, and resonant story of how women’s bodies are scarred, stitched, and remade.
Trained as an artist at the Slade School of Fine Art and as a Fulbright Fellow at Pratt Institute, New York, her work has been widely exhibited and cited in key feminist art histories. This painterly sensibility now shapes her work in graphic narratives and illustration, where richly layered artworks merge with text to explore complex embodied stories and visual identities. Her recent title, A Graphic Guide to Pregnancy and Birth (Icon Books) was created with illustrator and cartoonist Lilly Williams, and extends her pioneering work in visual health communication.
Laura worked as a curator and creative producer in the live art sector for 12 years, founding the company Home Live Art in 1999. She initially used domestic spaces in her own home, and then a range of other site-specific locations in collaboration with major arts and cultural organisations to platform innovative and challenging performance work.
Training to be a midwife in 2013, Laura has gone on to combine healthcare and creative practice to champion women’s voices. She is founder of Maternal Journal, an award-winning global movement supporting mental health through creative journaling, which won the Basil Lee Award for Innovation in Communication, awarded by The Royal Society of Medicine. Other professional roles include as Member of the NMC (Nursing & Midwifery Council) Midwifery Strategic Advisory Group, Chair of Shifrah UK, Culture and Awareness Lead NHS Jewish Staff Network, Editorial Board of the Practising Midwife Journal and Council member of The Jewish Medical Association.
She is winner of a JKP Writing Prize, ‘Stories of Resistance’, an Arts Council England ‘Develop Your Creative Practice’ Award and a JLF ‘Genesis’ Emerging Writers Fellowship and has contributed to recent titles such as An Artist and a Mother (Demeter Press), and Mothering: A Performance (Routledge).
She is currently working on a graphic memoir, Scar Tissue: a vivid, urgent, and resonant story of how women’s bodies are scarred, stitched, and remade.
Image: Laura (centre) holding a banner 'Deeds Not Words' at the Artichoke Procession event, celebrating 100 years of women's suffrage.