Lauren Bon, artist and director of Metabolic Studio, navigates critical social and environmental issues by identifying systemic loopholes and developing emergent strategies for transformation. In 2005, her project Not A Cornfield transformed a vacant industrial 32-acre site in downtown LA into a living sculpture of corn, challenging land use policies and reimagining urban ecologies. Since then, Metabolic Studio has been working to reconnect this same floodplain with its historical water source (the LA River) through Bending the River, a 20-year project that circumvents conventional infrastructure to create alternative water systems within the cyborg watershed. A recent work of disturbance ecology, Moving Mountains (2024-), uses transplanted mountain soil rescued from the Topanga Canyon landslide to create a series of novel ecosystems along the industrial corridor of the LA River. Lauren is a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts.
