ABOUT

Born and raised in Suburbia (Lancaster, PA), Laura grew up building refrigerator box forts and getting caught in traffic jams behind Amish horse and buggies. She completed her BFA with honors in Film and Television from NYU Tisch School of the Arts with a concentration in cinematography and dual minors in Art History and Social and Cultural Analysis in 2017. Laura was a finalist for the 2017 Undergraduate Volker Bahnemann Arriflex Award and the proud recipient of the 2017 Bahoric Meisel Award for Women Cinematographers.

Laura has worked thousands of hours as a cinematographer, camera assistant, gaffer, and grip, on professional film shoots including independent feature films, award winning short films, music videos, and commercials. Collaborators and clients include Joan Baez, SNL, VICE, Snapchat, TED X, Oslo Freedom Forum, Glamour, Teen Vogue, Milk Makeup, The American Museum of Natural History, Steinway Piano Factory, Gatorade, Nike, Lego, Playtex, Samsung, Extinction Rebellion, MIF, the Manhattan Men’s College Basketball Team, KYRA TV, and Elite Daily Magazine.

In spring 2020 her photo work ‘Get Lucky’ was exhibited in the Tate Modern, London, UK as part of the Tate Collective curated show Every Day Dora Maar - an accompaniment to their retrospective of the iconic surrealist photographer. Other highlights include a visual album collaboration with Joan Baez as well as her work developing, producing, and executing the lighting design for 'CAVE' - a sold out music performance event in the world's first underground watertight cylindrical structure (The Brunel Museum Grand Entrance Hall, London, UK) in 2018. CAVE featured two 20th-century pieces of music based on texts by Plato performed by a 35+ member orchestra and vocalists. 

In 2023 she directed and shot a music video on 16mm film for ambient / experimental duo Space Afrika, for their track Meet Me at Sacha’s . Recently, she has also worked a cinematographer for artist Cécile B. Evans on an ambitious virtual production film shoot for her work Reality or Not and collaborated with internationally renowned artist group Blast Theory on their Manchester International Festival commission We Cut Through Dust. Laura is currently working in development on a feature length documentary and several short films.

Ultimately, Laura is fascinated by the ways our experience of the world is shaped by visual elements. Above all, she believes that great cinematography is a marriage between aesthetics and narrative and that every visual decision a cinematographer makes should fundamentally reinforce the story being told. 

Laura has taught as a professor of Undergraduate Cinematography at the Maurice Kanbar Institute of Film and Television, NYU Tisch School of the Arts and currently Lectures on 16mm and 35mm cinematography at the University of Salford in Media City UK, Manchester, England. She is an Arri Certified Film Instructor and holds a PGCAP. You can read more about her in British Cinematographer Magazine.