Lawrence Andrews

Lawrence Andrews is an Associate Professor of Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he teaches within the Film and Digital Media department. His career spans both academic and artistic domains, with extensive exhibition history at major institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Modern Art (New York and San Francisco), Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and the American Film Institute.

Andrews' artistic practice focuses on cultural and mass media constructions of history and identity, with particular attention to issues of race, power, and representation. His compelling video essays employ multi-layered strategies of appropriation to examine violence, exploitation, and racism in relation to media representation, art-making, and institutions. Andrews' works are characterized by a fragmented, disjunctive structure that combines visceral and didactic elements with narrative and formalist approaches, creating associative pastiches of text, original material, and found footage.

His recent work continues to explore Blackness through mass media and popular culture, as seen in mythicPotentialities (2021), which examines the murder of Emmett Till and its mediation through civil rights documentaries. Andrews' artistic output reveals a bold approach to strategies of appropriation and multi-textuality that challenges conventional documentary forms while maintaining social critique.

Andrews has received significant recognition including:

• Rockefeller Intercultural Documentary Fellowship
• Two National Endowment for the Arts Artist Fellowships
• Fulbright Grant (1989)
• San Francisco Museum of Art's SECA Video Invitational
• Awards from Long Beach Museum's Open Channels and Film Arts Foundation

His educational background includes photography studies at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C. and a B.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute. Andrews' teaching and artistic practice are united by his belief that 'culture is all we are as people; we speak about it, look at ourselves through it, and ultimately change because of it.'