Laura Dolp is a writer, printmaker, music historian, and the founder of Stenen Press. She is known for her vibrant, wide-ranging work and multi-disciplinary artistic practice.
As a visual practitioner, Dolp utilizes the material history of antiquity to investigate the nature of decay and rebirth, the relationship of part to whole, and the uneasy spaces between a distant past and the contemporary moment. Her collage series “Where I hoped rock would be” (2023) harnesses archeological forms and the material layering of ancient palimpsests.
Dolp’s artist books are a hallmark of her collective practices in their synthesis of shortform writing and visual 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.
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. Dolp is Associate Professor of Musicology at Montclair State University. She holds a Ph.D. in Historical Musicology from Columbia University.
She lives and works in New York City.