Lauren Bradshaw is an artist, curator, and scholar of material culture. She is currently a PhD student in Design History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and earned an MA from the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture at the University of Delaware in 2025 as well as an MFA in ceramics from Clemson University in 2021 and a BA in studio art from the University of North Georgia in 2019. Her historical research primarily focuses on the relationship between eighteenth-century needlework practice and social constructs of femininity. She presented her research on eighteenth-century needlework at the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies conference at Oxford University in 2025 and the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies conference in 2026 and recently had an essay published in the exhibition catalog for Revolution in Their Words at the Daughters of the American Revolution Museum in Washington, DC.

In conjunction with her historical research, her own studio practice has gradually shifted towards textiles, and her most recent body of work integrates found objects of cultural significance with materials and processes commonly and historically associated with the labor of women. She has recently shown these embroidered works at galleries in New York, Philadelphia, and across the Southeast. Additionally, she curated the 2025 exhibition Interstitial Agency at the Athens Institute for Contemporary Art in Athens, Georgia as well as upcoming contemporary craft exhibitions including Shrouded Fissures at the Appalachian Center for Craft in 2027 and HOMEBODIES at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design in 2028.