LAUREN RAINE is a visionary painter and mixed media sculptor, as well as a choreographer and theatrical mask artist. Her MFA is from the University of Arizona and BFA from the University of California at Berkeley. In 1995 and 2000, Lauren studied traditions of Temple masks in Indonesia, and produced a series of collaborative masks with Balinese mask artists, including Ida Bagus Anom. The series was exhibited at Buka Creati Gallery in Ubud, Bali. In 1999 she made 30 multi-cultural masks of Goddesses for The Spiral Dance at Ft. Mason Center in San Francisco; since then she has directed five theatre productions with the masks, and numerous presentations and workshops. A 7 year project, The Masks of the Goddess Collection travelled throughout the U.S. with other producers, ritualists, and choreographers. They have been performed at the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, New York, N.Y., Nations Hall Theatre in Tucson, Arizona, the Black Box Theatre in Oakland, California, the University of Creation Spirituality in Oakland (Matthew Fox), the New College of California, and Matrilineage Festival at Syracuse University. In 2007 and 2008 she taught at the Kripalu Institute in Massachusetts, and in 2007 she was awarded a fellowship with the Alden Dow Creativity Center at Northwood University to develop her "Hands of the Spider Woman" Project, for which she also received a grant from the Puffin Foundation . In 2009 she will be a resident artist at the Henry Luce Center at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C.

Recent exhibitions include " Hands of the Spiderwoman", a community arts project (in collaboration with Kathy Space), at the Midland Center for the Arts and Creative Spirit Center (2007 and 2008), a 2-person show of paintings at Turn of the Century Gallery in Berkeley, California (2005), Sacred Icons at the Artisans Center of Virginia (2005), Sacred Space/Sacred Mask (with Catherine Nash, 2004) at The Muse Community Arts Center in Tucson, Arizona. Currently she is working on a series of books. References and Resume available upon request.

"Because I most enjoy working with community art projects, I’m always delighted by the synergy of the group, and thus many of my projects are cross-disciplinary. Artists are myth makers, linking and weaving the past and the future with the stories we tell, joining a grand conversation that continually grows. By exploring myth in contemporary ways we activate ancient taproots that can sustain us into the future. " Lauren Raine, 2008