Lou Lou Sainsbury (b. 1994; London) is an artist working across moving image, live-performance, poetry, drawing, sculpture and textiles. Sainsbury's work seeks to tell stories exploring histories of resistance, transformation and entanglement. With collaboration at the core of her practice, rituals and invocations, collective study, domestic intervention, adaptation, songwriting and make-shift mutations make up some of her idiosyncratic research methods. Making connections between spirituality, medicalization, colonialism and technology, her tricksterish work attempts to excavate a historical and imagined past of queer and trans life within the brokenness of human and more-than-human worlds.
Her recent solo exhibitions include Ehrlich Steinberg, Los Angeles; Roodkapje, Rotterdam; Gasworks, London & Humber Street Gallery, Hull. She has presented in group exhibitions and festivals including Herald St, London; Rencontres Internationales, Paris; International Film Festival Rotterdam; Tate Modern, London; Nottingham Contemporary and La Casa Encendida. Sainsbury has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including Mondriaan Fonds in 2023 & 2025 and Freelands Gasworks Partnership Program in 2021. She was an artist in residence at EKWC, Oisterwijk in 2024. Sainsbury received her MA from the Dutch Art Institute in 2021 and previously was an associate artist at Open School East in 2017. She is currently an associate artist of Conditions Studio Program in Croydon
Visions in the Nunnery: Onyeka Igwe
Visions in the Nunnery is a biennale programme of moving image work hosted at the Nunnery Gallery in London. Exhibiting Artists: Lucy Cash, Kate Clark, Jo Cope, Gabi Dao, Anna Doyle, Duck & Rabbit Projects (Arlene Wandera and Richard Zeiss), Tessa Garland, Onyeka Igwe, Sana Iqbal, Mark Jeffery, Emery Joan, Maria Joranko, Anthea Kennedy, Bo Lanyon, Maybelle Peters, Niyaz Saghari, Lou Lou Sainsbury, Kadie Salmon, Vicky Smith, Wilma Stone, Kialy Tihngang, Sasha Waters, Ian Wiblin and Sheri Wills.
The 69th BFI London Film Festival
Here, human and more‑than‑human lives intermingle in peculiar ways. Each film uncovers untamed stories where power, survival and transformation twist into unanticipated forms. A programme featuring new film works by Gabi Dao & Lou Lou Sainsbury, Natasha Tontey, Zhenia Stepanenko and Alice Diop.
States of Resilience, Museum Arnhem & Down the Rabbit Hole
Sick Notes: Anne Boyer
This is an evening dedicated to Pulitzer Prize-winning author and poet Anne Boyer and her blistering memoir, The Undying: A Meditation on Modern Illness (2019). The talk was followed by a Q&A and preceded by a screening of Prowse’s new video work Flare: the muted outline of a body in bed as a camera flash overtakes the scene (2025), and Lou Lou Sainsbury and Kari Rosenfeld’s film The Law of Desire is Fascist (2022), along with a reading session led by the Feminist Duration Reading Group.
EKWC Artist in Residence
Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival
And Enter – in the final shorts programme of Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival 2025, seven films interrogate the meaning of thresholds, constellations, collaborations and portals. Featuring works by Louis Scantlebury, Weipeng Huang, Ж, Juliana Kasumu, Lou Lou Sainsbury, Martyna Ratnik and Madison Brookshire.
Mondriaan Fund: Prospects
It hûs is net ien, Triënnale fan Beetstersweach
Artist Philipp Gufler pays homage to artist Cosy Pièro with a new live performance titled Remembering Cosy. The afternoon concluded with a conversation about Cosy, followed by a performative reading of A Cloud That Bites by Lou Lou Sainsbury.
EKWC Artist in residence
Museumnacht 010: Rapture
A night of performances with Shasti, Gabi Dao, XI3LLA, Lou Lou Sainsbury. Personas and semi-fictional characters create ruptures between metaphysical, astrological, paranormal and elemental worlds, including a performance and screening of A Fantastic Body (2024). Curated by Ratri Notosurdirdjo.
We'll Be Your Mirror
A group exhibition featuring works with Markus Amm, Alexandra Bircken, Josh Brand, Beth Collar, Coleman Collins, Michael Dean, Trix and Robert Haussmann, Emi Mizukami, Joan Nelson, Joel Otterson, Lou Lou Sainsbury, and Jeffrey Stuker.
A Cloud That Bites
The solo exhibition includes a newly commissioned multi-channel video installation, sculpture, photography and drawing. Constructed around two semi-fictionalized characters - Sunbeam and Fowelley - A Cloud That Bites moves between a historical and imagined past of trans histories, speaking to passages of life and death, resurrection/revival, communion, possessions and invocations, exploring the transformative properties of a body that lives in and of the weather.
de gang mondt uit gedachten veranderd
An evening of literary readings and performances, featuring my performance General Feeling – a sonically transformative love letter to an alien within, based on rewritten stories from Richard Von Kraft Ebbing's Psychopathia Sexualis.
Mutant Sensualities
How can writing be transformative to our bodies? Reading Room Rotterdam landed at Eiland Brienenoord to host Mutant Sensualities led by Lou Lou Sainsbury. A speculative-fiction writing and foraging workshop exploring how sensual experience can help us rethink and reimagine our troubled relationships to more-than-human-worlds
descending notes
Screening of 'descending notes (2022)', presented in the RTM program 'Dream States'.
DESCENDING NOTES / LIKE RAIN IN THE ABYSS
A solo exhibition comprising video installation, sound sculpture, scent, poetry and drawing, as a remix and expansion of my Gasworks commissioned film 'descending notes (2022)'.
Earth is a Deadname
Earth is a Deadname is a constellation of work that seeks to reimagine transgender experience beyond the limiting language of medicalization, rewriting its histories into a cosmic poetics of trans sensuality, relationship and desire. Comprising film, sound, stained-glass installation, sculpture and live-performance, the exhibition features collaborations with the artists Ada M. Patterson, Kari Rosenfeld and Raffia Li.
Freelands Gasworks Partnership Programme
In 2021 I was awarded the Freelands Gasworks Partnership Programme, consisting of a 3 month residency and touring solo exhibition at Gasworks, London and Humber Street Gallery, Hull in 2022-2023.
my hole is the place where i call myself a mother
A solo exhibition by Lou Lou Sainsbury, produced in collaboration with music by Marie Tučkovà and performance by Sarjon, and curated by Kris Lock. Drawing on research into colonial histories, Christian iconography, holes and trans motherhood, Lou Lou Sainsbury presents a multidisciplinary installation that extends through waxy poetics and knotted, spiraling time forms as a distillation of historical consciousness and an allegory for love, caring and listening.
The Future Is Now - Tate Lates
An evening of performance, workshops and discussions, featuring my performance 1667: Not Alive, Just Living (2019). A video installation and performed exorcism to ignite the spirits of Arthur Coga – a late recipient to the 17th century non-human to human blood transfusions of the French physician, Jean-Baptiste Denis, who made numerous attempts to transfer the spirit of the lamb ( via blood) into sick human patients to heal them.