Laura Jean Dahl is a boundary-pushing writer, artist, producer, and educator who thrives on blending contradiction: humor with horror, fine art with trash, beauty with brutality. With a knack for marrying big ideas and practical budgets, Laura’s work bridges creative storytelling and hands-on execution. Her writing is grounded in human complexity—shaped by years working with underdogs, outsiders, and those rebuilding after trauma.

She’s a people-activist at heart—always siding with the vulnerable, always rooting for the underdog. Whether working with dually diagnosed adults, foster children, or moms in addiction recovery, she brings empathy, clarity, and a refusal to look away. Her stories live in that tension, peeling back surface layers to reveal raw, psychological truths—then adding a wink or punchline when it stings too much.

Her creative life began with detours and dead ends: a teacher who flunked her for spelling, a warm-body substitute who handed out magazines, and a string of art and writing instructors who told her to get out. Undeterred, she earned a BFA in photography before returning to school to hone her writing. She learned to write by persistence—teaching herself grammar and the rhythm of art and language from art history. 

She rarely keeps a job for more than a year, except in art, teaching, and writing, where she reinvents the challenge every time. Her resume includes antiques dealer, group home manager, skin care formulator, fine art photographer, recovery home director, and backstage tour guide at Disney World. Her stories bend genres, cross continents, and mix horror, comedy, and beauty without blinking.

Her debut novel The Ring of Roses is a modern-day horror fairytale set in Barcelona. It follows a pair of potential lovers trying to connect while something monstrous manipulates them from the shadows. It’s a love story. It’s a monster story. A study in how survival turns you into something you swore you’d never become.

She lives in the desert mountains with her husband of 33 years, the youngest of their three children, and a fluctuating number of large, well trained animals. She also collects wine, sews dresses from vintage patterns, studies theoretical physics for fun, and streams video games on Twitch—because why be normal?