Office Hours
- Monday: 1:30 p.m. - 2:30 p.m.
- Tuesday: 1:00 p.m. - 2:30 p.m.
- Wednesday: 1:00 p.m. - 2:30 p.m.
Biography
Korpo / AARK #2520, Finland
Lori Hepner is a Pittsburgh based new media artist working primarily in new media performance, wearable technologies, fine art photography, and community centered public art projects.
She has spent considerable time over the last five years in artist residencies in 2 Pittsburgh neighborhoods, in a small Arctic Community in coastal Norway, as well as in Finland, Iceland, and the Canadian Yukon. Lori was featured in the WQED documentary, Visible, featuring five female artists from Pittsburgh, in Spring 2018, and focusing on the Color Beechview project, an intergenerational, community centered public art project in the city neighborhood of Beechview.
A collaboration with singer Kendra Ross has manifested itself into live performance as Hepner & Ross in Intersection*ology. A feminist exploration into the power of women, technology, and individual voices, she developed the real‑time, light painting system that is used to draw with light using the body. Intersection*ology has been awarded grants by the Heinz Endowments, the 2018 Carnegie International, and The Opportunity Fund and has been performed at the Kelly Strayhorn Theater’s Alloy Studios, in Durban, South Africa, the InLight Richmond Festival in Richmond, Virginia, and at the Luminaria Festival in San Antonio, Texas.
Lori's personal photographic work has been featured in Time, Wired, and Next Level Magazine and has been exhibited at the Houston Center for Photography, Carnegie Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, in photo festivals in the Netherlands, China, & Spain One of her Twitter portraits from Status Symbols, as well as her performative photographs from #Crowdsourced Landscapes project, will be sent to live on the moon in 2021 in The MoonArk project.
Hepner holds an MFA in Digital Media from Rhode Island School of Design and a BFA in Fine Art Photography from Rochester Institute of Technology. She was promoted to Professor of Integrative Arts at Penn State University and recently returned from the community of Træna, Norway where she founded a community makerspace and plastic recycling project for 3D printing, as a Fulbright Scholar.
Teaching Interests: Photography, Digital Art, 2D Design, Video Editing, Augmented Reality
Area(s) of Expertise: Photography, Visual Art, Digital Art, Video
Research Interests
Status Symbols: Twitter Portraits; #Crowdsourced #Landscapes
2020 American Arts Incubator, Kosovo;" Zero1 & US State Department 1 of 6 artists paired to represent the USA in Colombia, Brazil, Peru, Austria, Ukraine, or Kosovo for the Spring 2020 AAI Program. 1 month, new media public art facilitator & social challenge workshop leader. https://americanartsincubator.org/american-arts-incubator-2020-lead-arti...
Fulbright Specialist Grantee: Norway: Recycling for Sculptures"; 6 week comunity art project with AIR Træna & Træna Music Festival, Plastics for Sculpture is limited edition, 3D printed sculptures created from on-site Festival recycling to encourage festival goers to trade in used plastic (drink glasses, bottles, and found plastic on public beeches, to create recycled 3D printer filament to print the sculptures (6/4 - 7/24/19).
Status Symbols" & "Crowdsourced Landscapes" in the Moon Ark'; The Moon Arts group commissioned a Status Symbols portrait for inclusion in the Moon Ark, along with 5 artworks from the Crowdsourced Landscapes series of artworks that are engraved on ruby disks, which will be sent to the Moon to as a mini moon museum. (Launch TBD, 2020). moonarts.org http://moonarts.org/chamber_component/metasphere/croudsourced-landscape…
"Color Beechview" Public art project with the City of Pittsburgh, CitiParks, Age Friendly Pittsburgh, AARP, and Lively Pittsburgh. 3 community light-painting workshops, Mural on the Red Line T, sidewalk mural, and 5 building facade murals, Beechview Senior Center, Pittsburgh, PA. (Sept. - Oct. 2018).
Education
Rhode Island School of Design | MFA in Digital Media | 2005
Rochester Institute of Technology | BFA in Fine Art Photography | 2003