Lauren V Coons is an intermedia composer, performer, writer, healing arts practitioner, and teaching artist based in Portland, Oregon. As a lifelong interdisciplinary artist, Lauren is driven by a deep belief in the power of creativity to heal, connect, and bring meaning to everyday life, and she brings that belief equally to her compositional work and to her teaching, facilitation, and community practice.

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Lauren's compositions span a wide range of instrumentation, voice, and electronics, and frequently integrate movement, poetry, spoken word, and visual art into a single intermedia work. She composes open and adaptable works for people of all abilities and disabilities, creating pieces that invite individual interpretation and highlight the unique creativity and voice of each performer. Her creative process is rooted in curiosity and presence: exploring a small urban dam, spending an hour with a tree, walking as slowly as possible over a rickety footbridge, or documenting every neighborhood in her hometown. Whatever the medium, her work is characterized by a sense of playfulness and reverence, and favors simplicity as a means of uncovering depth. She frequently invites performers and audiences into the compositional process itself, whether through improvisation, collaborative interpretation of non-traditional notation, or community contribution via social media and outreach, working to dissolve the walls between composer, performer, and audience.

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Lauren has composed works by invitation from the University of New Mexico Art Museum, the UNM Health Sciences Center Orchestra, Abrepaso Flamenco, Wave Dash Duo, New Music New Mexico, and the New Mexico Contemporary Ensemble, among others. Her work has been performed at the John Donald Robb Composers' Symposium, where she was recognized as the recipient of the 2016 Scott Wilkinson Composition Award.

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Lauren's creative life has always moved between sound and movement. With over thirty years of study in multiple dance forms including ballet, jazz, contemporary, modern, contact improvisation, and West African dance, her work as a dancer and choreographer is as central to her practice as her work as a composer, encompassing choreography, movement-sound composition, and performance in both formal and community contexts.

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Lauren currently serves as Program Director at Ethos Music Center in Portland, Oregon, where she is committed to making music education and the arts accessible to all. She has also worked as an artist-in-medicine for the University of New Mexico's Arts-in-Medicine program, bringing music and mindfulness to patients and staff at UNM Hospital, and co-taught the Healing Arts courses at UNM alongside program founder Dr. Patricia Ann Repar. She has served as a composer teaching artist for the Santa Fe Opera's Active Learning Through Opera program and as a faculty member at Albuquerque Academy's Think Summer program, teaching music, composition, and Healing Arts. She is also proud to have delivered arts programming through the Anderson Abruzzo Albuquerque International Balloon Museum, the Jewish Community Center of Greater Albuquerque, and the UNM Music Prep School.

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Lauren holds a Master of Music degree with dual concentrations in Music Theory & Composition and Musicology from the University of New Mexico (2017), where she specialized in American experimentalism, improvisation and indeterminacy, post-tonal theory, and social practice art. She is a Polestar Pilates trained and AFPA-certified Pilates Mat instructor, and a School of Positive Transformation certified mindfulness and meditation teacher.