Louise Steinman

Louise Steinman

Alum 2002

Louise Steinman is a writer, artist, and literary curator. Her work frequently deals with memory, history, and reconciliation. She is the author of The Crooked Mirror: A Memoir of Polish-Jewish Reconciliation, The Knowing Body: The Artist As Storyteller in Contemporary Performance, and The Souvenir: A Daughter Discovers Her Father’s War, which won the Gold Medal for Autobiography from Foreword Magazine.

Louise was founder and curator of the celebrated ALOUD literary series at the Los Angeles Public Library. She was the recipient of the 2019 Chora Prize for lifetime achievement in the arts from Annenberg Foundation.

She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, California Arts Council, and had residencies at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Ucross, Blue Mountain Center, and Centrum, as well as the Mesa Refuge.

Her essays have been published widely, most recently in Los Angeles Review of Books. She is the editor of the 2018 anthology Country Gone Missing: Nightmares in the Time of Trump. Her art installation with Dorit Cypis, Welcome the Strange: An Urban Installation for Social Engagement, was featured at the Open City Festival in Lublin, Poland, fall 2019. She currently co-directs the Los Angeles Institute for Humanities at the University of Southern California.