About

Lauren John Joseph (formerly know as La JohnJoseph) is an artist and writer, working across the page, the stage and the screen.

Polaroid: Lauren JohnJoseph

As a writer, LJJ has authored a series of solo plays, a volume of prose fiction, and a libretto, they have contributed to newspapers, magazines, and journals internationally for the past decade.

Lauren’s performance work includes theatre, film, opera and pop music. They have presented this performance work across the UK including the Royal Opera House, The Bristol Old Vic, HOME, and the Southbank Centre, as well as internationally, at MoMA (SF), Deutsche Oper and Martin-Gropius-Bau (Berlin), Fancy Him (Tokyo), La Java (Paris) and the Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niterói (Rio). For seven years they performed as their “identical twin brother”, Alexander Geist, generating a parallel body of work through this autonomous persona.

Visit Alexander Geist


As an artist, Lauren makes moving image works, which investigate the convergence of social class, gender identity, and religious faith in the matrices of social power, often in collaboration with non-professionals. They also create contemporary relics; art objects which explore materiality as a conduit for the immaterial, usurping the natural with campy combinations of text and image and installation. LJJ has contributed to group shows in Berlin, Mexico City, London and Manchester, and has been awarded grants from Arts Council England, the Jerwood, the British Council, and the Wellcome Trust.

Hello Lover

(Video, 26mins, 2016)

Hello Lover

Images by Amnon Friedman

Commissioned by Left Coast as part of Future Popular

Back to the gallery

Writing

“Renaissance man/woman/whatever-who-cares JohnJoseph combines sexual liberty, violence and religious devotion into a soup blender of pop culture and history” - DAZED

La JJ writes on contemporary culture, art, pornography, gender theory and the Golden Age of Hollywood. Their work has appeared, in print and online, in iD, The Independent, Sleek, The Guardian, Time Out, Attitude, Amuse, Huffington Post, Siegessaule, Parterre de Rois, Out There, and in the ‘zines Birdsong, Fat Zine, 21st Century Queer Artists Identify Themselves, and Not Here: An Anthology of Queer Loneliness.

They are the author of the solo plays, “Boy in a Dress” and “A Generous Lover”, and the prose fiction volume, “Everything Must Go”.

Lauren's debut novel, "At Certain Points We Touch", will be published by Bloomsbury in March 2022.


Cover of At Certain Points We Touch

At Certain Points We Touch

"A stone-cold masterpiece by a shocking new talent" - OLIVIA LAING

"I haven't read a book that so powerfully evokes what it's like to be a wild young artist among other wild young artists since the Bright Young Things" - TORREY PETERS

"Lauren's debut novel is so exciting. The writing is so fresh, funny and gripping - and carries the trademark wit that I have always loved from Lauren" - TRAVIS ALABANZA

Lauren's debut novel is a story of first love and last rites. Conjured against a vivid backdrop of London, San Francisco and New York it is a riotous and razor-sharp coming-of-age story.

PRE-ORDER THE BOOK


Cover of Plays

Boy in a Dress / A Generous Lover

“Both campy and moving, this story of love and insanity mixes humor with pathos.” - The New York Times

“Elegant, incisive and intoxicating ...powerfully mobilises the distinctive forms and sensibilities that make them such a rich, compelling artist” - The Scotsman

“Horrifying and funny and defiantly beautiful” - Frieze”

Two of La JJ’s plays "A Generous Lover" and "Boy in a Dress” are published in a double volume from Oberon Books.

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Cover of Everything Must Go

Everything Must Go

“Brutal and beautiful...fast-paced, witty, and irreverent.” - LAMBDA

“illuminated by a talent one encounters only once or twice in a lifetime.... worthy of an R. Firbank or Dame E. Sitwell.” Bruce Benderson

“A strange and exquisite pleasure, a garden of earthly delights. Wildly funny, dirty, sexy, brutal, absurd, but always engaging and heartbreakingly human." – Jake Arnott

La JJ’s first foray into long-form prose, "Everything Must Go”, is a A viciously absurd road trip across a psychedelic post-apocalyptic landscape. Likened to Kathy Acker and Ronald Firbanks, it was nominated for the LAMBDA Literary award for best Trans Fiction, as well as the Polari First Book Prize.

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Cover of Any Instant Whatsoever

Any Instant Whatsoever

Written to accompany the eponymous performance piece, this is a short story detailing a day in the life of the mysterious Mr Geist, the show’s protagonist. Published by And What? Festival, the text is accompanied throughout by photographs from Sven Gutjahr.

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Contemporary Relics

Moving Image

Performance

Contact

Photograph of Lauren John Joseph

Email: hello@laurenjohnjoseph.com


Agent: Zoe Ross
zross@unitedagents.co.uk




Instagram


Homepage illustration by Sophie Iremonger
https://sophieiremonger.com

Archive

Underclass Hero (2010)

(Image by Adrian Lourie)

You Are Boring (2015)

(Dir. Vika Kirchenbauer)

Practically Royalty (2015)

(Image: Bruce Atherton and Jana Chiellino)

Weimar New York (2008)

(Image by Liz Liguori)

Notorious Beauty (2008)

(Image by Ves Pitts)

I Happen To Like New York (2009)

(Image by Akif Hakan)

Cover Her Face (2014)

(Image: Leon Csernohlavek)

Alexander Geist (2015)

(Image Manuel Moncayo)

Vissi d’ arte (2009)

(Image AbsolutQueer)

Underclass Hero (2010)

(Image: Stevie Hanley)

An Illustrated History of Longing (2009)

(Image: Jeffrey Gordon Baker)

BoyfriendRobotique (2005)

Gay Icon (2007)

(Image: Legs Malone)