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Detroit native Lillien Waller is the creator of multiple platforms exploring art practice and the creative impulse, including Watch Me Work (2016–2021), an award-winning video and profile series showcasing practitioners at the College for Creative Studies. In collaboration with Kresge Arts in Detroit, she wrote Practice (2022–2023), an essay series meditating on art and method across disciplines.

Lillien has shown her own interdisciplinary artwork as part of the group show Parallel Visions at Wasserman Projects (One Practice, 2019) and as part of Wayne State University Galleries’ public art series, In the Air II (Face, Off billboard installation, 2021).

A poet and essayist, Lillien holds a BA in English from University of Michigan, an MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College, and master’s degrees from New School for Social Research and Emory University. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets. She conceived and edited American Ghost: Poets on Life after Industry, an anthology of poetry, lyric essays and photography examining the impacts of de-industrialization on community, culture, identity and the natural world. She is a 2015 Kresge Artist Fellow in Poetry.

Lillien has profiled dozens of artists, makers and scholars. In 2023, she received an Arts Writers Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.