Lauren Frances Adams, chair of the Painting and Drawing Departments at Maryland Institute College of Art, studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, received her BFA from UNC-Chapel Hill and her MFA from Carnegie Mellon University. Her awards include the Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Award, the Trawick Prize, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award.

Her work has been widely exhibited in artist-run spaces, historic homes, university galleries, museums, and public spaces, with recent projects at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Winterthur Museum and Gardens, the North Carolina Museum of Art, Smack Mellon, and the Andy Warhol Museum. Her work has been reviewed in Frieze Magazine, The Washington Post, The Baltimore Sun, Artslant, and Hyperallergic. Lauren is a founding member of Ortega y Gasset Projects, a project space in New York. Her work explores political and social histories through domestic ornament, rooted in her experiences growing up on a farm in the American South and inspired by her belief in the need for reckoning with the past in order to understand the present.