BIO
LAURENCE LEWIS NEAL (they/them)
Photo Credit: Blair
is a nonbinary writer, historian, and artist, currently living on Musqueam, Squamish, and Tseil-Waututh unceded and ancestral lands, which Canada has stolen and continues to colonize as “Vancouver.” Neal’s essays, research, and interviews interrogate how physical space is gendered and raced in community building and politics. They have been published in Dissent, Guernica, and After Ellen, and their prose was a finalist for the Summer Literary Prize. They have two zines currently in bookstores: Surprise! You Have a Nonbinary Friend and A Guide to Cis-Hetero Grooming Your Child.
As a writer-in-residence at the Grin City Collective, Neal first explored poetry as ritual, removing it from strictly Christian contexts and reappropriating it as a personal form of healing inclusive of queer experience. In their interactive poetic installation All My Saints at the Rurally Good Festival, they conducted ritual readings canonizing people in our past as a form of healing. They then conducted rituals of release for nonbinary/trans bodies in THEIR BODY BECAME (an offering) at We Rise 2021. In 2023, they partnered with Blair to present My Spring. My Crown., a ritual centering trans reclamation that was supported by a grant from the City of West Hollywood and the Transgender Arts Initiative.
Neal has worked on the inaugural season of Star Trek: Picard, the CBS series Clarice, and the Showtime series The Man Who Fell to Earth. Their scripts have placed in Script Pipeline’s teleplay competition, the Austin Film Festival’s teleplay competition, and Canon’s Shoot-Out Competition. Their short piece Harvey was a finalist in the Quick Cuts Competition and screened at Vision Fest in Los Angeles, and their 35mm photography has been exhibited at HER/LA. Prior to working as a creative, Neal was a sales agent at Cinetic Media in New York and spearheaded the theatrical release for Banksy’s Oscar-nominated documentary Exit Through The Gift Shop.
They hold a B.A. in Film Studies and a M.A. in History. They are currently earning an M.F.A. in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia.
laurlewisneal@gmail.com