Laurie Margot Ross is an author, consultant, curator, and the director of Glocal Matters. A leading expert on masks, emotions, and religion, her work is informed by over three decades of transregional research, emphasizing Indonesia and the Indian Ocean World.
biography
Laurie’s fascination with masks began as a child. In her home, the art of George Grosz, Max Beckmann, and Romare Bearden were displayed side by side with masks from New Guinea and Nigeria. She played with these masks as a child. Taking a systematic approach, she held each one over her face while striking different poses until she found one that resonated with the personality of the mask. Upon locating it, she moved around her home in character with complete abandon. Laurie recognized her lack of inhibition behind the mask: it was as palpable as her self-consciousness without one. Decades later, her students reported experiencing similar dissociation. Its ubiquity led Laurie to study how inhibition and its lack work from the inside out, and under which conditions emotions are absorbed and shared between mask wearers and those observing them.
The freedom Laurie experienced behind the mask led her to study an Islamic dance tradition in coastal West Java, Indonesia after high school. There, she trained with the tasawwuf (Sufi) mask dance master Dasih binti Wentar (d.1985). During her year in Indonesia, she recognized her teacher as well as other Indonesian maskers also experienced cognitive shifts in consciousness. In recent years, her emotions research has broadened to include other devotional and protective objects—especially those worn close to the heart to forge a more intimate connection to the Divine. Her extensive mask training led her to develop a mask use program implemented in therapeutic settings.
Dr. Ross's other areas of interest are tribal and 20th century art. She has curated exhibits on prints, drawings, and performing objects, and was the proprietor of Metropolis Art Books—a rare and scholarly book business dedicated to the visual arts. She has worked with curators, museums, and university librarians in collection development in the United States, Germany, the Netherlands, and Indonesia.
Laurie earned her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of The Encoded Cirebon Mask: Materiality, Flow, and Meaning along Java's Islamic Northwest Coast (Brill, 2016). She is currently working on her second book, tentatively titled, “Embodied Objects.”