Lori Esposito (she, her, hers) is an artist and educator who has taught in higher education, museums, community centers and social organizations for over a decade. She earned her MFA from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and her PhD from The Ohio State University in Art Education, with a focus on sensory-led artistic practices that interact with naturally occurring cycles such as evaporation and decomposition. Esposito has an experimental and traditional background in drawing and painting and has presented her work at cultural centers, museums, and universities nationally and internationally. She has received numerous teaching awards and is committed to meeting students where they are to make deeper connections with their environments. Esposito is a neurodiversity advocate, dedicated to nurturing creative interdependence, and re-imagining shared spaces where disabled and non-disabled folks can make their worlds.
Esposito’s work enquires into interdependent relationships between humans and their environments, to engage critical dialog around grief, healing and temporality. Lori ‘s work decenters the artist/subject by focusing rhythmic processes, allowing people to self-organize in relations with their environment. Her gentle and playful way of inviting dialog, and making sure everyone feels heard, is a result of compassionate listening, toward making new connections. She is gifted at pacing and connecting through materials and making with participants. Her practices focus creative and sensory-led approaches to attune with our environments, to deepen processes of self-discovery.
Some of her interests include field-based painting and drawing, sound recording, and the layered knowledge of plants. Her curiosity in movement and place also challenges traditional organizing divides such as inside/outside and living/dead. Esposito’s recent textile performance practice extends from an arts research study finding ceremony in the everyday and synchronizing with the many rhythms in our surroundings. She gathers her ingredients (pigments from spices, teas, and composted fruits and vegetables) to prepare dye baths and gathers in small portions what is available in her surroundings. finding meaning and forgetting in the multiple durations of decomposition. Esposito finds meaning in her encounters learning from plants, and immanent processes a such as evaporation, and collaborates with natural systems around human conceptions of change and growth.
