Laurence Cuelenaere (b. Belgium) is a cultural anthropologist and visual artist. Her visual work interrogates the affective production of photography. In her conception of photography, her objective is to add human complexity and alter the relation between the photo and the referent in the world. Photographs are therefore not representations in the strict sense of the word. She accentuate the magic of the photograph by means of stitches, veil, or paint to challenge belief in their representational nature, conjuring a latent space, to establish new connections between the world and the photograph. Her work is informed by her long term ethnographic research with indigenous populations in Mexico and Bolivia.
She received her PhD in cultural anthropology from UC Berkeley and MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She has received the first place of the Yousuf Karsh Photography Prize at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. She was awarded a Travel Fellowship from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and was the winner of the 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.