Lauren van Haaften-Schick is an art historian and curator in New York City. In fall 2024 she joined the faculty of the Arts Administration Program at Teachers College, Columbia University as a Full-Time Lecturer. In 2022 she completed a PhD in the History of Art and Visual Studies at Cornell University. Lauren’s research considers historical intersections of art, law, and technology, with a focus on artists’ contracts, artists’ rights laws, and artists’ interventions in law since the 1960s. Core interests include the career of Seth Siegelaub, conceptual art, institutional critique, history of the art market, and economic and labor issues. Her PhD dissertation focused on Siegelaub’s The Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement from 1971. Lauren also recently co-edited the major anthology Seth Siegelaub: “Better Read Than Dead,” Writing & Interviews 1964-2013 (Koenig Books and Stichting Egress Foundation, 2020).

From 2022-24 Lauren was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for the Humanities at Wesleyan University. She was formerly a 2020-21 Predoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and a 2021-22 Fellow at the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy at NYU School of Law. From 2018-2019 she was a Digital Life Initiative Doctoral Fellow at Cornell Tech. Recent public projects and talks include the interview series Redistribution hosted by the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts in collaboration with Kenneth Pietrobono, and “Seth Siegelaub’s Many Circulations” at SOMA Summer in Mexico City. She has published in the journals Grey Room, Panorama, The Journal of Cultural Economics, and The Oxford Handbooks in Law Online among others. Her exhibition Canceled: Alternative Manifestations & Productive Failures, first exhibited at the Center for Book Arts, NY, in 2012, traveled to Albright College, Reading, PA, and Smith College, Northampton, MA among other venues. Non-Participation, a collection of artists’ letters of protest and refusal, traveled to the Luminary St. Louis, MO, in June 2014, the Art League Houston, Houston, TX, in November 2015, and 1er Escalón in Murcia and Espacío Trapezío in Madrid in 2016. In 2023 Lauren curated a section of the exhibition Seth Siegelaub: Textile, Art, Theory at the Fondazione Antonio Ratti in Como, Italy. 

Lauren has received awards and grants from the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Engaged Cornell, the Terra Foundation for American Art, The Mellon Foundation, and The Massachusetts Cultural Council, among others. She has lectured and presented her work at Georgetown University Law Center, New York University, Parsons, and Fordham Law School, among many other art and academic institutions in the U.S. and abroad. From 2015-17 she was Associate Director of the Art & Law Program, NY and Curatorial Fellow in 2012. In 2011-12 she served as a research assistant for Siegelaub and his work on art law and textile history. She was a founding director of Gallery TK in Northampton, MA from 2004-06, AHN|VHS gallery and bookstore in Philadelphia, PA from 2009-10, and the independent curators group Extra Curricular from 2013-15. Lauren has previously worked as a gallerist, archivist, researcher, grantmaker, administrator, and printmaker. She received a BA in Art History/Arts Administration and Studio Art from Hampshire College in 2006.