Lou Lou Sainsbury is an artist based between London and Rotterdam, working across film, live-performance, poetry, drawing, sculpture and textiles. She is a self-described time traveller, making things that unwrite histories of living beings into tricksterish dreamscapes, exploring identity, community and ecological entanglement. She often works in collaboration, developing intimate long term research-led projects guided by improvisation, cinematic processes and sonic thinking.

Lou Lou’s work questions how we can become better listeners and how bodies can trouble history and geography. Moving across a poetics of sensual communion, her practice maps a cosmology of saints, aliens, hauntings, musicality, mysticism and elemental passions. Within this, writing ritual, collective study, domestic intervention, adaptation, songwriting and make-shift mutations make up some of her idiosyncratic research methods.

Utilising an expansive sensory material vernacular, Lou Lou’s work speaks towards transfeminine experience as a social process of finding resonance and belonging within the brokenness of human and more-than-human worlds. Through sonic exploration, splits, leakages, loops and remains, her genre-bending practice defies categorisation whilst troubling the cinematic. Rooted in friendships and everyday life, haunted and heartfelt, or humorous and uncompromising, her transformative work seeks to imagine stories for more liberated futures.

After graduating from her MA in Art Praxis at the Dutch Art Institute in 2021, Lou Lou was recipient of the Freelands Gasworks Partnership Programme. Previously she was an associate artist at Open School East in 2017, after completing her BA in Moving Image at the University of Brighton in 2016.

Recent solo exhibitions include: Ehrlich Steinberg, Los Angeles (2024); Roodkapje, Rotterdam (2023); Humber Street Gallery, Hull; Gasworks, London (2022) and Well Projects, Margate (2020). Lou Lou’s recent group exhibitions, performances and screenings include: Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin; International Film Festival Rotterdam (2023); Whitstable Biennale (2022); Centre for Contemporary Arts, Prague (2021); La Casa Encendida, Madrid (2020), Tate Modern, London; Nottingham Contemporary; Yaby, Madrid (2019) and Flat Time House, London (2018).