Lori Hepner is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily in conceptually based photography and photographic installations. Her most recent body of work, Status Symbols, is a series of portraits that are studies of identity in the digital age of social media through. The portraits focus on visualizing text-based tweets into abstracted visual portraits by using the on/off signature of the computer’s native language, binary code. She is a graduate of Rhode Island School of Design, earning an MFA in Digital Media in 2005 and received her BFA in Fine Art Photography from Rochester Institute of Technology in 2003.

Lori’s work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally including exhibitions at the the 14th International Lishui Photography Festival in Lishui, China, Houston Center for Photography, Duke University, the SRO Photo Gallery at Texas Tech University, the Carnegie Museum of Art, and the Brooklyn Museum’s @1stsfans project, to name a few. Lori’s work has been featured in SPE’s Exposure Magazine, the Center for Photography at Woodstock’s PQ#99 magazine, Time Magazine’s Lightbox blog, and in Fall 2012 a 7 page spread with article in the UK-based Next Level Magazine: Pittsburgh Edition.

Lori was also selected to participate in Descubrimientos PHE at PhotoEspaña 2010 in Madrid, Spain and a traveling exhibition with select photographers from PHE10 was exhibited in Valencia, Seville, and Bilbao, Spain during 2010-11. Most recently, she was chosen as a Selected Photographer, one of 35 from the US, in the Magenta Foundation’s Flash Forward 12 and had her work included in a select traveling exhibition that has been shown in London, Toronto, and Boston in 2013. Lori currently lives and works in Pittsburgh, PA where she is Associate Professor of Integrative Arts at the Greater Allegheny campus of Penn State University.