Lori Hepner: March 2026
Lori Hepner is an artist working across photography, new media performance, and community-centered public art. Her practice, Drawing with Light, uses self-built programmable and wearable LEDs loaded with her own sky and cloud photographs to create movement drawings captured through long-exposure photography and real-time video projection.
Hepner's work has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, Carnegie Museum of Art, Houston Center for Photography, and in photo festivals in the Netherlands, China, and Spain. Her photographic artwork has been featured in Time magazine, Wired, and Next Level Magazine. She was a 2019 Fulbright Specialist to Norway and the 2023-24 Penn State Laureate.
Her public art commissions include integrated architectural glass for Pittsburgh International Airport's new terminal, permanent installations at the University of Nebraska Omaha and UPMC Mercy Hospital, and stainless steel sculptures with augmented reality for The City of Pittsburgh's Davis Avenue Bridge connecting the Brighton Heights neighborhood to Riverview Park. She will be in residence at Ucross in Sheridan, Wyoming in March 2026, and will be featured in the Summer 2026 edition of OCEANUS Magazine.
Hepner holds an MFA from RISD and a BFA from RIT. She is a Professor of Integrative Arts at Penn State Greater Allegheny. Her work is in the collections of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, Carnegie Museum of Art, BNY Mellon, and PNC Bank.
Drawing with Light is rooted in the belief that light, movement, and gesture can open pathways to contemporary art that are both embodied and inclusive.
My practice transforms lived experiences into visual form through movement-based processing. In my current Something About the Sky series, I photograph skies during significant life moments. These include my father's heart transplant, pandemic isolation, and being in alpine meadows. I then reperform these memories through "sky dances" in the studio. Custom LED arrays programmed with these sky photographs generate light traces during long-exposure photography, translating emotional experience into visible form. This methodology emerged from discovering my neurodivergence in 2019, understanding that I require physical movement to process information meaningfully. What I had developed as artistic practice was actually neurological necessity.
The studio becomes a space where I can respond to experiences language cannot address: being jolted awake by emergency sirens for a tornado that no weather app predicted; trusting my body's reading of pressure changes; experiencing cotton candy clouds while watching a sunset from the backseat of an Uber.
My community-centered public art projects, where I bring my technology and hand it to others, began with Color Beechview (2018) for the City of Pittsburgh. I worked with UPMC Mercy Hospital to bring light painting to patients, families, health practitioners, and community members for the new Pavilion building (2023). I continue this offshoot of my practice, which is much more figurative as it includes actual people from projects' communities, concurrently with my ongoing studio work.
Recent and Upcoming Exhibitions:
Something About the Sky, Pittsburgh International Airport — Integrated architectural glass for the Apron Level Restrooms in the new terminal. Fabricated by McGrory Glass. Opened 11/2025. These are on the North & South end of the lowest level of the new PIT Terminal (where you exit to walk to Parking Garage or catch a ride-share).
Drawing with Light, Mercy Movement, UPMC Mercy Hospital Pavilion, Pittsburgh, PA. First Floor, Uptown Cafe (open to the public).
Run, Throw, Glide, Roll, Breathe: Our Kinesthetic Dynamics, University of Nebraska Omaha — Permanent commission of 20 pieces for the School of Health and Kinesiology, 2024.
River to Riverview: Breezes Between, Davis Avenue Bridge, City of Pittsburgh — Four stainless steel sculptures with augmented reality. Fabricated by Vegeley Welding. (I'll have additional AR documentation to share soon.)
Ucross Artist Residency, Sheridan, WY (March 2–13, 2026)
A.I.R. Gallery National Members' Exhibition, Brooklyn, NY — Opening April 2, 2026 (April 2 – May 3). More details to follow.
Featured in OCEANUS Magazine, Summer 2026 edition. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, Falmouth, MA.
Schmidt Ocean Institute Artist-at-Sea blog post that ties into upcoming OCEANUS Magazine feature https://schmidtocean.org/cruise/seeping_cascadia_margin/
Upcoming Public Art Project in Western PA (not yet announced), completion ~ 2029.
Drawing with Light: Cloud Dances Excerpt