LAURA ARENA is a designer, curator and artist who lives and works in New York City and Berlin. She has shown work in galleries in New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Massachusetts and has exhibited internationally in Germany, Palestine, Sweden and Iceland. She won the Spring Arts Competition at the Schoolhouse Gallery in 2008.

Arena shoots with plastic cameras that feel and work much like toys and allow a sense of anticipation and excitement to be part of the process. The final images are rooted in her decisions about place, time, subject and point of view but the resulting prints always contain a degree of surprise. She just recently started to shoot with a digital camera, a "Digital Harinezumi 2", a camera that produces results similar to 110 film and that has 3 visible buttons.

In the past year, Arena has started to work with moving images and installation. She screened a video at Supermarket, an artist run art fair in Stockholm, Sweden with a group of artists who participated in the Dionysia Residency in Iceland. She screened her second video “Bi’lin 2009/Tel Aviv 2010″ at Reindeer Island/700IS in Iceland, SCOPE Art Fair and Local Project in New York City.

This summer in New York City, Arena assisted artist duo Bittertang in the building of "Burble Bup" an installation on Governors Island for Figment, an annual celebration of participatory art and culture. She also assisted artist Natalia Porter in building a 35 ft. trajinera called "Xochitl", a typical boat found in Mexico City which is part of Sea Worthy, an experiment in, exploration of, and tribute to maritime art. "Xochitl" is going to be at the Queens Museum of Art for "Mexico Now Festival" in October.