Dr. Lauren Gorelov

Creator, MatraSpeak

With nearly 20 years of experience in the arts, Dr. Lauren Gorelov is an artist-researcher specializing in verbatim performance and its intersections with identity, motherhood, and lived experience. She is the creator of MatraSpeak, a verbatim play built from interviews with working mothers, now staged inside law firms and financial companies across NYC.

As a passionate educator, Lauren serves as a student teaching supervisor and adjunct professor at NYU, where she mentors emerging drama educators and leads workshops on culturally responsive approaches to drama in education.

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That's one of the reasons I created MatraSpeak: to take the things women were saying privately and put them on a stage.
Dr. Lauren Gorelov, Creator, MatraSpeak

Her feature, digitized

Read it the way it ran in print.

"Anyone who has ever known a mother." That's the line that opens her feature in the September 2026 issue, pages 47–51. Below is the actual spread, page for page, exactly as it appears in print.

Read the complete September 2026 issue →

You spent years researching working motherhood while simultaneously raising two young sons and completing your doctorate. What was it like to study motherhood so deeply while actively living it yourself?

This work was both personal and professional; it was impossible to fully separate the research from my own experience. Mothers in my study often expressed contradictory feelings: they could be deeply ambitious and also want to step away from work, incredibly grateful to be mothers and also miss who they were before having children. It was really beautiful to see how motherhood does not exist as a single story.

You've brought this verbatim play into male-dominated financial and law firms across NYC to cultivate conversation about the working mother. What changes are you hoping happens next?

One of the most powerful things I've witnessed with MatraSpeak is a mother sitting in the audience and realizing, "I'm not the only one who feels this way." It's also important to me that these stories reach people who don't share those experiences. I always say this work is for anyone who has ever known a mother. Ultimately, I want MatraSpeak to help shift workplace culture, creating empathy around what we ask working mothers to carry.

Read the full feature in the September 2026 issue.

Open the issue