Lauren Levato Coyne

Lauren Levato Coyne is a writer, artist, and educator based in the Berkshires. Her writing considers queerness, climate change, and issues around race, class, and disability. Her artwork is more of a fabulist endeavor that emerges from the ecological imagination.

Levato Coyne is trained as a political journalist and worked as a daily news reporter, copy editor, and features writer for a decade in the earlier part of her career. After earning her MFA in painting at Cranbrook Academy of Art, she began writing about visual art. Her reviews and essays appear locally and internationally in publications such as Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture (UK), The Berkshire Eagle, Boston Art Review, Brooklyn Rail, HEY! (France), Gulf Coast Literary Journal, Sculpture Magazine, and others.

Her writing has received a number of awards including the 2026 AICA-USA Irving Sandler Award for New Voices in Art Criticism; a Toni Beauchamp Prize for Critical Arts Writing, awarded by Legacy Russell; a Rabkin Foundation travel grant; and a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship for poetry and painting. In 2025, she was a finalist for the Warhol Arts Writers Grant.

Additionally, Levato Coyne is the 2026 artist in residence at the Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies at UMass Amherst. While there, she is researching early modern perspectives around animals, ecology, and the Medusa myth in pursuit of one question: what happened to Medusa’s abandoned body? Her exhibition Medusa’s Bestiary: Embodiments & Ecologies will be on view at the Kinney Center from September 2026 through at least May 2027. Her visual practice has also received a number of awards and her work is in many private collections.

Levato Coyne teaches art in the Paleobiology and Oceanography departments at Williams College. RISD appointed her as a visiting critic for fall 2026.