Lauren Redniss is the author of several works of visual non-fiction and the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant." Her book Thunder & Lightning: Weather Past, Present, Future won the 2016 PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love and Fallout was a finalist for the National Book Award and adapted as a major motion picture (Radioactive, 2019, dir. Marjane Satrapi). The New York Times called her 2020 book, Oak Flat: A Fight for Sacred Land in the American West, “brilliant” and “virtuosic.” She has been a Guggenheim fellow, a fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars & Writers and the New America Foundation. She was Artist-in-Residence at the American Museum of Natural History in 2013 and, in 2020, created an 8000 square foot installation at Lincoln Center for New York City Ballet. She teaches at the Parsons School of Design in New York City.
The National Book Foundation wrote the following in its citation of Radioactive, the first visual book to be named a finalist for the National Book Award in Non-Fiction:
“Redniss’ achievement is a celebration of the essential power of books to inform, charm, and transport. In marrying the graphic and visual arts with biography and cultural history, she has expanded the realm of non-fiction.”