Saturday, May 23, 2026 |  9:00 AM – 5:00 PM PDT

Location | Albrecht Auditorium
Claremont Graduate University

CGU hosted a one-day Mormon studies conference, Negotiating Agency: Mormon Women in Art, History, and Narrative. Bringing together scholars, artists, and community members, the conference explores how Mormon women have expressed and experienced agency through lived experience, creative practice, and historical circumstances. The program is organized around three thematic conversations: women’s narrated life stories and oral histories; visual and artistic expressions of agency; and scholarship on Mormon women’s lives and choices across time. Presenters draw on interviews, archival research, and artistic interpretation to examine agency as shaped by power, identity, and constraint, rather than as a simple story of freedom or resistance.

The conference was accompanied by a curated art exhibition, Becoming Sovereign: Agency, Art, and Mormon Women, which was introduced during the program and remained open for viewing throughout the day and the following week.

The conference concludes with a keynote address by Jennifer Finlayson-Fife, who will reflect on Mormon women, agency, and moral development, bringing the conference’s creative and scholarly themes into conversation with contemporary questions of selfhood and ethical life.

Below are videos of the event. Audio quality varies in the different sessions.