Laura Dolp is a writer, printmaker, and the founder of Stenen Press. She is known for her vibrant, wide-ranging work and multi-disciplinary artistic practice.
As an artist, Dolp takes a research-driven approach that combines printmaking and literary texts. Her collages incorporate imagery of pre-historical archeological sites and their post-classical texts; in particular, islands of human habitation in the Mediterranean Basin like Sardinia, Cyprus, and Malta, or sites on the peninsulas of the Baltic Sea, where the evidence of pre-history still maintains its hold on the modern landscape. Recent series include “Where I hoped rock would be” (2023) and “Mother-tongue” (2024- ).
Dolp’s artist books are a hallmark of her collective practices, through their synthesis of short form writing and collage to explore inscription, erasure, and memory. Her Book of Hours (2021) explores the mythology of place. Modeled loosely on the richly illustrated devotional texts of early modern Europe, it draws widely on sources from Italian, German, Swedish and Arabic literature, as well as music, photographs, architectural blueprints, and geological maps. A forthcoming book, Sofia (2025), takes the form of a dream-atlas that weaves new poetry and illustrations drawn from two print series.
As the Founder and Director of Stenen Press, Dolp oversees the acquisition, translation, and illustration of a variety of global literatures for English-speaking audiences. By placing acts of translation and the visual arts in alliance to tell stories, Stenen Press provides new avenues of cultural engagement for its readers. Its bilingual editions support the idea of the border region as a space of extraordinary creative capacity and provide opportunities to reinvent geo-political and temporal spaces.
Dolp has also written extensively on the historical agency of music as a site of human transformation. Her publications address a variety of themes including music and spirituality, the interrelation of music and social spaces, modes of mapping and musical practices, and the poetics of the natural world. These include several reception studies of the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, and an epistolary account of American experience in Nasser’s Egypt in Letters from Cairo (2021).
Dolp is a working member of the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop in New York City and KKV Grafik, Konstnärernas Kollektiva Grafikverkstad in Malmö, Sweden. She has been a resident artist at the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica di Venezia. After over two decades of teaching, Dolp left her academic post in 2024 to devote herself full time to her artistic practice and Stenen Press. She holds a Ph.D. in Historical Musicology from Columbia University.
Dolp grew up on the west coast of the United States, in the fertile valleys of the Columbia River watershed. Now she lives and works in New York City, on the Hudson River.