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LAUREL NAKADATE is a photographer, video artist, and filmmaker. She began her major work while still an undergraduate. In order to attend raucous parties at Wellesley, Smith, and Mount Holyoke, women’s colleges,NAKADATE would drive from Boston, attend the parties, sleep in her car, and drive home the following morning. She was not there to party but to capture images on point-and-shoot 35 millimeter camera. Her taste for the bizarre, the uncomfortable, and the hypersexual developed there. The project that developed based on that work, entitled “Girls’ School,” helped facilitate her entrance into Yale University, where she received an MFA in 2001.

Her work explores “themes of voyeurism, exhibitionism, discomfort, loneliness, disconnection, longing, wishing, watching, hostility, gullibility, fear, cunning, slapstick, and folly,” there are also key elements belonging that belong under the larger heading of gender studies. LAUREL‘s work blurs the lines between objector vs. objectified, predator vs. prey and considers them– sometimes ouright, sometimes subtly– in a very contemporary manner.

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Stay The Same, Never Change is the first feature-lenght film by LAUREL NAKADATE. She did everything from write the script to direct, hold the camera and edit. Thematically, the film is closely aligned with her photo and video art and traces the emotional contours of a group of young girls as they live out the exquisite boredom of their teenage years in Kansas City.

Stay The Same, Never Change has been premiered at the Sundance Film Festival last year (2009), and was featured in New Directors/New Films 2009 at The Museum of Modern Art and Lincoln Center.

And good news she is currently completing her second feature film, “The Wolf Knife”.