Laura Wertheim Joseph (she/her/hers) is a curator, educator, and writer currently exploring how her creative practices relate to her maternal practice. Becoming a mother in 2020 has deepened her longstanding interests in the wisdom, history, and multiplicities of time held within and imprinted on bodies, emotions, and material culture. She has a deep investment in working collaboratively to reflect her belief in the importance of recognizing and valuing interconnection and interdependence in creative work, by extension of the interconnection and interdependence between people and the natural world we share.
This way of seeing the world has often drawn Laura to the margins and the shadows to celebrate undervalued sources of wisdom, underrecognized creative practices, and less common perspectives on cultural production. She has advanced this ongoing work— gaining insights from many different kinds of collaborators along the way—through more than a decade of researching, writing, teaching, and producing cultural programming and exhibitions. Before joining the M’s team, she completed curatorial, research, and book projects that include Harriet Bart: Abracadabra and Other Forms of Protection (Weisman Art Museum/University of Minnesota Press), Testify: Americana from Slavery to the Present (Hennepin County Library), Covered in Time and History: The Films of Ana Mendieta (University of California Press), and A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde(Mary and Leigh Block Museum/Northwestern University Press). Laura brings these commitments and histories to her work leading a collaborative, relationship-centered exhibition program at the M.
Laura holds a PhD in Art History from the University of Minnesota and an MA in Arts and Cultural Management from Saint Mary’s University. She specialized in contemporary art and critical theory with a focus on embodiment, affect, and materiality, as well as intersectional feminisms, and gender and performance studies. Before coming to the M, Laura also worked alongside artists with disabilities at Interact Center for the Visual and Performing Arts to challenge perceptions of disability.