The Queer Birth Project
The Queer Birth Project
Liss LaFleur
Liss LaFleur
The Queer Birth Project collects and broadly shares the experiences of LGBTQIA+ childbirth and family-building, blending art, research, and activism to challenge dominant narratives of belonging and celebrate diverse experiences of kinship. Through an innovative collaboration between transmedia artist Liss LaFleur and sociologist Katherine Sobering, the project translates stories collected from 150 queer parents in the US into artworks that reflect on the everyday joy, creativity, and challenges involved in building queer families. Organized into six thematic collections—on bodies, identities, family, loss, feeding, and birth—the Queer Birth Project unfolds as a series of modular immersive installations. Each collection is anchored by a libretto, a long-form poetic text composed from participants’ narratives and produced as a six-part studio album. These texts are performed as atmospheric soundscapes that amplify the voice through digital distortion and immerse the listener in a collective experience.
Soundscapes are accompanied by artworks that make queer interventions into conventional mediums: neon signs that visualize queer vocabularies and expressions, textiles that deconstruct themselves into fringe, and mixed-media works that expand representations and shift perspectives. Together, these elements create intimate, multisensory environments that invite audiences to engage with the emotional and embodied dimensions of queer families. The project will culminate in a series of exhibitions, a digital video game-as-archive, and a co-authored book—offering multiple pathways for audiences, scholars, and communities to engage. At its core, the Queer Birth Project affirms that reproductive justice requires imagination, creativity, and care. In a time when reproductive and LGBTQIA+ rights face growing threats, the project envisions a queer future, imagining childbirth and kinship as expansive, experimental, and rooted in the possibility of worlds yet to come.
Installation, Socially-Engaged Visual Art, Sound Art, Visual Arts
2026
About Liss LaFleur
Denton, TX
Liss LaFleur is a transmedia artist whose interdisciplinary practice spans moving image, installation, and queer–feminist politics. A second-generation glass artist, LaFleur integrates time-based media with craft traditions, using the fragility of materials and the poetics of technology to interrogate and expand notions of gender, family, and futurity. Hir multimodal projects are rooted in extensive archival research and employ technology as a generative tool, creating radical spaces for reimagining personal and collective care in the twenty-first century. LaFleur’s work has been recognized with fellowships and awards from the John F. Kennedy Center, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Ford Foundation, and has been reviewed in Slate, The Advocate, Hyperallergic, and The Brooklyn Rail. From botanic gardens in Houston to large-scale projections on the Brooklyn Bridge, notable presentations and screenings of hir work include Tate Modern (London), SXSW (Austin, TX), Reykjavik Art Museum (Iceland), the Smithsonian Institution (D.C.), Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Telematic Media Arts (San Francisco), and the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art (South Korea), among others. LaFleur is Associate Professor of New Media Art at the University of North Texas and founder/director of the Future Feminist Lab. Raised in Houston, TX, she holds an MFA in Media Art from Emerson College, where she was an Artist Fellow and affiliated researcher at the MIT Media Lab. Hir studio is in Texas, where she lives with hir wife and children.
Liss LaFleur is a transmedia artist whose interdisciplinary practice spans moving image, installation, and queer–feminist politics. A second-generation glass artist, LaFleur integrates time-based media with craft traditions, using the fragility of materials and the poetics of technology to interrogate and expand notions of gender, family, and futurity. Hir multimodal projects are rooted in extensive archival research and employ technology as a generative tool, creating radical spaces for reimagining personal and collective care in the twenty-first century. LaFleur’s work has been recognized with fellowships and awards from the John F. Kennedy Center, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Ford Foundation, and has been reviewed in Slate, The Advocate, Hyperallergic, and The Brooklyn Rail. From botanic gardens in Houston to large-scale projections on the Brooklyn Bridge, notable presentations and screenings of hir work include Tate Modern (London), SXSW (Austin, TX), Reykjavik Art Museum (Iceland), the Smithsonian Institution (D.C.), Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Telematic Media Arts (San Francisco), and the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art (South Korea), among others. LaFleur is Associate Professor of New Media Art at the University of North Texas and founder/director of the Future Feminist Lab. Raised in Houston, TX, she holds an MFA in Media Art from Emerson College, where she was an Artist Fellow and affiliated researcher at the MIT Media Lab. Hir studio is in Texas, where she lives with hir wife and children.