Lauren Raine

Lauren Raine is a painter, sculptor, mask artist, performance artist, author, and choreographer with work in international private and public collections. She holds a BFA from the University of California at Berkeley and an MFA in painting and cross-disciplinary arts from the University of Arizona (1987). She has attended Otis Art Institute and the New England Institute for Art Therapy. Raine was an exhibitor at the Symposium for Art and the Invisible Reality at Rutgers University (organized by Dr. Rafael Montanez Ortiz) in 1989. She began a mask business in 1991 after winning "Best of Show" at the Mill Ave Arts Festival in Tempe, Arizona, and in 1992 designed a line of mythic masks for festivals and other events in the Neo-pagan community. In 1999 she opened Rites of Passage Gallery in Berkeley, California. In 2000 she made masks for Hungry Ghosts of Albion, and collaborated on Tragos, a film and play by Antero Alli.

After studying mask traditions in Bali in 2000 with traditional Balinese mask artists (including Ida Bagus Anom), she created a collection of 35 multi-cultural, mythological "Masks of the Goddess" for the Reclaiming Community's Spiral Dance, which she conceived of as "Contemporary Temple Masks". From 2000 to 2008 the collection traveled throughout the U.S., and has been in use by numerous groups of performers, ritualists and teachers. In 2007 she initiated 3 community art projects based upon a Native American creation myth, "Spider Woman's Hands". She was on the faculty of the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in 2007 and 2008, and was a recipient of the Alden B. Dow Creativity Center Fellowship for the year 2007. She was a Resident Artist at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C. in 2009, and resident artist at Gallery 408 in Carrizozo, N.M in 2010. In 2011 she was a presenter at the Goddess Conference in Glastonbury, England.

The Sacred Mask: Liminal Tools for Community and Personal Invocation

In traditional cultures, masks are used to in-voke the Goddesses, Gods and Elemental Powers, and are respected for their intrinsic, oracular, and accrued power. Even in the contemporary world, when masks are approached as sacred tools, magic can happen. In this workshop we’ll explore approaches to the creation, use, and potential of masks for community ritual and as "vessels for our stories".