Lauren O’Neill is a mixed media artist and designer, muralist, and illustrator. 

Originally from Baton Rouge, LA; her love playing with colors was almost instant and her childhood dream job was to own Crayola. She vividly recalls a commercial from the 1980s about some sad-looking kids sitting in an all white room when suddenly there's a splash of colors and the kids go wild. It wasn’t until middle school that she realized she might actually have some art talent and this was honed by her high school art teacher, Ms. Coco (who still supports her work via social media some 25 years later). That first spark of art confidence happened at the Baton Rouge Senior Exhibit when she sold her first piece of artwork - a one-point perspective drawing of a room filled with clashing patterns rendered in Prismacolor which now hangs outside the Dean of Education’s office at Louisiana State University.

Initially, she started at LSU as a forensic anthropology student and was fascinated by the reconstruction of skulls that was breaking new scientific grounds in the department. However, theatre won over due to the broader scope of creativity it offered through constructing large sets and sewing costumes. O’Neill received her BA in Theatre Design and Technology from Louisiana State University in 2003. After graduating, she spent many years working with various theatres and circuses across the United States.

After Hurricane Katrina, she returned to her hometown and began a self-educated art practice focusing on items that are left behind and forgotten. This has continued to inform her practice decades later through the use of found materials including discarded books and photographs. Looking to get out of her comfort zone, she submitted a piece to the AVA Juried Member Exhibition and won Honorable Mention.

Lauren O’Neill also received her Masters of Library and Information Science degree from Dominican University in Chicago, Illinois in 2024. She is the librarian and theatre teacher at Normal Park Museum Magnet. When she was in second grade her parents took her and her siblings to the library regularly. It wasn’t until later when she asked her mom about it did she learn that when her parents were going through a divorce, they went to the library to keep from being able to yell at each other. But to her, the library has always been a safe space to explore and look for artbooks that fed her childhood artistic passions. Her creativity is used everyday through teaching students not only how to be inquisitive explorers of the world through books, but is the founder of the school’s puppetry news program in partnership through the Chattanooga Arts Build grant. Much like walking into her own home studio, her students never have any idea what they’ll be working on next.

She lives and works in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

CV