Laurence Cuelenaere (b. Belgium) is a cultural anthropologist and photographer who works at the intersection of art, social practice, and critical theory. Her ethnographic research addresses political issues pertaining to social justice and migration. Her visual work examines the affective conditions of the production of images, but also how photography can resist the oppressive conventions of racial neoliberalism.
She received her PhD in cultural anthropology from UC Berkeley and MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She has conducted long term ethnographic research in Mexico and Bolivia. She has received the first place of the Yousuf Karsh Photography Prize at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts where she was also awarded a Travel Fellowship, she received a fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and was the winner of the 2022 Current Anthropology Visual Anthropology Competition. She has exhibited her work and her publications have appeared in a variety of peer-reviewed journals: e.g. Cultural Anthropology, Ethnohistory, Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Critique of Anthropology and Language Sciences.
Cuelenaere lives on the ancestral lands of the Musketaquid peoples.