Laura is a Setjedi.
“Setjed” comes from the Demotic for storyteller.
Demotic is the language of Ancient Egypt, a transitional alphabet from hieroglyphics to Greco-Latin that would eventually become Coptic.
As a Coptic Egyptian, it was important for me to keep the storytelling of Ancient Egypt alive…

About

Laura Boutros is an Egyptian-American creator pursuing a PhD in Communications Research at the Royal College of Art in London, England. She received her MFA in Digital Arts and New Media at UC Santa Cruz in 2020. Her practice focuses on personal catharsis, Egyptian diaspora, and liminality by stitching together media, current events, and historical precedent to capture contradictory pathos.

Her MFA production Amduat: The Twelve Hours of Ra, was an immersive multimedia theater experience that centered on the Egyptian-American diaspora. Drawing on themes of circularity and liminality, the work situates Egyptian aesthetics in the Western museum space and draws on the Ancient Egyptian myth of Ra’s twelve-hour journey in the Duat. Collaborating with A Curated Situation to create “Stolen: An Art Auction Masquerade,” which asked guests to bid on secrets whose owners were only to be revealed at the end of the night, she began to shift her work and research into “social theatre.” She is expanding on this research in her PhD, drawing on hauntological practices and the role of storytelling as a communal process.

She worked as a Video Production intern for Euphoric Styles and the Santa Cruz Music Festival for two years honing her take on a curated artistic experiences. Her time working in media marketing created in her an interest in audience reception theory and the role humor plays in audience community formation. These topics appear in Macbeth: I Want it Frat Way, a satirical staged take on Reality Television through the lens of a college Fraternity directed at UC Santa Cruz.

In the past, she has worked with Director Kirsten Brandt on the third iteration of The Frankenstein Project, which explored monsterhood, fragmentation, and layered media also in UC Santa Cruz. For her Undergraduate thesis film, Enlightened, she combined this layering and fragmentation to explore the fictional relationship between a wronged Pharaoh and her descendant, a key theme that carries through her work…