Lauren Bon (born 1962) is an environmental artist who works with architecture, performance, photography, sound, and farming, to create urban, public, and land art projects that she terms "devices of wonder" to galvanize social and political transformation. She is a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts.

Based at her Metabolic Studio, between Chinatown and Lincoln Heights, Los Angeles, her signature works include: Not A Cornfield (2005-2006), which turned a 32-acre brownfield in the historic center of Los Angeles into a cornfield; Strawberry Flag (2009-2010), an aquaponic strawberry farm raised at an under-purposed property that was deeded to be a home for veterans in 1888; AgH20 (2007) a 240-mile work that aims at reconnecting Los Angeles with the elements that made it viable historically, both mined from the mountains of the Owens Valley. Her 2017 project, Bending the River Back into the City, utilizes Los Angeles’s first water commons and allows the currency of water to create social capital The Optics and Sonic Divisions of Metabolic Studio have exhibited and performed widely, including at MASS MoCA, MA (2016), George Eastman House, NY (2013), Nevada Art Museum, NV (2014), Hammer Museum, CA (2015), and BBC Radio 3, UK (2014). Bon’s solo exhibitions are Hand Held Objects, at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, CA (2003) and Bees and Meat, at ACE Gallery, CA (2007)

Lauren Bon's mother is Wallis Annenberg.

Bon holds a Master of Architecture from MIT and a BA from Princeton. She trained as a dancer at the Bat-Dor Dance Company, Tel Aviv (1979); the Martha Graham Dance Company, New York (1982); and the Lar Lubovitch Dance Company, New York (1985). From 1983 to 1985, she was the personal assistant of Isamu Noguchi, and she studied with artists Michael Singer (1988 and 1992); Elyn Zimmerman (1992); Magdalena Abakanowicz (1995). Helen and Newton Harrison are mentors and collaborators with Bon. She was divorced from Croatian artist Ranko Bon in 2003.

Bon is a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship recipient, and she serves as a trustee of the Annenberg Foundation.

In 2005, Lauren Bon created Metabolic Studio. Derived from the Greek word for “change,” "metabolism” is the process that maintains life. In continuous cycles of creation and destruction, metabolism transforms nutrients into energy and form. The actions generated by Metabolic Studio are global in focus and reach: developing new tools for urban living and city planning; inventing novel social practices for political and environmental justice; and directing art practice to engage on the same scale as society’s capacity to destroy. Lauren Bon’s Metabolic Studio is a force for change, showing that another reality is possible and pointing the way new endeavors and practices in an age of economic and environmental scarcity. “ARTISTS NEED TO CREATE AT THE SAME SCALE THAT SOCIETY HAS THE CAPACITY TO DESTROY” proclaims a red neon sign on one wall of the Metabolic Studio in a warehouse on the edge of Chinatown in downtown Los Angeles.

Lauren Bon’s current project is Bending the River Back into the City - a three-part sculpture consisting of a belowground tunnel that diverts water from the Los Angeles River, a seventy-two-foot waterwheel that lifts the water to publicly accessible bio-remediation gardens on the roof of the Metabolic Studio building, and a distribution network of users voluntarily receiving the newly clean water. In Bon’s vision, water that would otherwise bypass the city via the river (which is the catch for the rain) en route to the ocean (which is the catch for the river) will be captured for the benefit of Los Angeles’s arid landscape. This long-term project will clean LA River water to potable standards, and the water will become part of a distribution network that will deliver water to individuals, organizations, and institutions in Downtown LA. This phased project will begin to manifest in 2018 with the creation of an inflatable dam that will sit in the LA River—bending and driving a percentage of the river water through a diversion canal, and into a treatment facility. Bending the River Back into the City will eventually provide a waterwheel named LA Noria that reanimates the legacy of the waterwheels that drove water on and around the site in the 19th century.

"Right now, all of the water that’s going out to sea does not reenter the city for any beneficial use, and that’s a paradigm that needs to shift. That’s the primary goal of La Noria."