Laura Burns received her Master of Fine Arts from the Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT in 1997 and her BA in French Literature from the University of Maryland, College Park, MD in1983. She has been exhibiting nationally and internationally since 1992. Solo exhibitions include Homenaje, Museo de Arte de Zapopan, Guadalajara, Mexico, Homenaje, Museo del Chamizal, Ciudad Juárez, Mexico and the Cambridge Center Gallery, Cambridge, MA. Group exhibitions include Writing with Light and Graphite, James Backas Gallery, Baltimore, MD, Breaking New Ground, Park School, Baltimore, MD, Works from the Permanent Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, Holding Up More Than Half The Sky, Art in General, New York, NY, Bread and Roses: 100 Years from the Lower East Side to the Maquiladoras, School 33 Art Center, Baltimore, MD, Faces and Lightheaded, Maryland Art Place, Baltimore, MD, Photography: Process, Preservation, and Conservation, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY and the Sterling Memorial Library, New Haven, CT as well as numerous private collections. Laura Burns teaches in the Department of Art and Art History at Goucher College in Baltimore, MD.

Over the past few years, I have been particularly interested in the lives of Mexican women living along the United States/Mexico border. Since NAFTA's inception in 1994, great changes in the border regions have significantly involved the social and economic status of women. The proliferation of maquiladoras (assembly plants) along the border has meant an increase in jobs for Mexican women since manufacturers believe women are docile and less likely to organize than men. But as women have become wage earners working outside the home, traditional gender roles and the relationships women have with their spouses and families have changed. Greater economic freedoms present both new power and greater risks for many women. No longer confined to domestic spaces, public life has put them in the path of violence. In the past 12 years, over 400 poor, young working women have been tortured and murdered in Ciudad Juárez. These murders are a result, I believe, of overcrowded cities, substandard living conditions, increased drug trafficking and a government that undervalues its' female citizens. It is also a function of the border as a no man's land. Neither fully North American nor fully Mexican, the border is its own country with a lawlessness that mirrors the United States' often cavalier attitude towards less economically powerful countries.

In 2003 and 2004, I made a series of portraits of 150 living and lively women from Ciudad Juárez, as an homage to those who have died as well as to those who live, work, fight and love. The pictures of dirt are a result of trying to grapple with these issues in another way. The images are from sites in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico where the bodies of many of the murdered women have been found. The trash-strewn, yet barren landscape speaks to me both about the consequences of unregulated industrial growth and about the status of Mexico's poorest working women. I hope that the space depicted leaves a sense of the enormity of the problem and the enormity of the loss.