Laurene Leon Boym was born in NYC in 1964. She earned a BFA from School of Visual Arts in 1984, and a MID from Pratt Institute in 1993. Since 1995 she has been a part of Boym Partners Inc. and in 1992 she founded the Association of Women Industrial Designers. She has taught at Parsons School of Design and in MFA design program at School of Visual Arts in New York City.  
Her studio´s designs include tableware for Alessi and Authentics, watches for Swatch, lighting for Flos, showrooms and retail displays for Vitra and exhibition installations for many American museums, including Museum of the City of New York and Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.  Boym Partners are the winners of the Nationa Design Award in 2009 and they have won eight I.D. Magazine Annual Design Awards, including the Best of Category in 2000, and two Federal Design Achievement Awards.  

Motivated by a sinking American economy,  after 20 years in New York City, the design studio of Laurene and Constantin Boym jumped at the opportunity to move to Doha, Qatar to start the first MFA design program in the Middle East. The Boyms, being naive optimists, embraced the otherness of their fledging adopted country as an opportunity to reinvent, to re-discover joy in the everyday, albeit with a Middle Eastern twist. What was not anticipated in their new adopted land was a dearth of culture, absence of proper materials, indifference and venues to exhibit and sell design. This is their story.