(starting with the most recent)
3/12/2026
Lorna Alkana is a creative collaborator and recluse who works on graphic design projects, teaching, and interactive installations. She’s looking forward to updating her website so it includes highlights from the past three years and navigates her online absence since she began her graduate studies in Creative Writing (2017) and ended up with an MFA in Graphic Design (2020). There’s album covers, book covers, lots of illustrations, a glowing spider-cat themed installation, and rock garden gradients. Compelling! With pictures!
7/15/2023
Lorna Alkana is an Orange County and Los Angeles-based artist, writer, and graphic designer. She uses recycled materials and fluorescent paint to create interactive, glowing installations that are friendly and odd. Her chalk art, murals, and digital drawings have been featured at music festivals (Music Tastes Good, Broke LA, Play Like a Girl) and cultural institutions throughout Southern California (Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, The Montalban, Huntington Beach Art Center). Alkana studied Creative Writing at USC and Graphic Design at Otis. She teaches Writing to Art students at CSULB and writes autobiographical blurbs in third person. Find her arting on her process blog lornaphone.com
4/04/2022
Hi! I’m Lorna! Ready for third person?
Lorna Alkana is an educator, editor, and graphic designer based in California. She’s interested in collaboration, dimension, and play.
9/14/21
Lorna Alkana is a creative based in Orange County, CA. Her arting focuses on people, palimpsest, and play. In her most recent collaboration she worked as illustrator for Angelina Sáenz’s book of poetry, Edgecliff (FlowerSong Press, 2021). She currently teaches literacy, paints on everything, and arts as Creative Director for the environmental sciences educational scholarship, the Spiros and Elizabeth Koulouris Award (SEKA).
5/10/20
I stitched this one together for the 2020 Otis College of Art and Design online Annual Exhibition.
Greetings! My name is Lorna Alkana, and I graduated from Otis College of Art and Design in May 2020 with an MFA in Graphic Design. I mix language and line drawings into interactive installations, speculative events, and found poetry. My background in Writing (USC, Creative Writing/Cultural Studies) and Education (TFA, Middle School English) influences my work.
Otis helped me develop enduring a practice that values expanding and questioning my understanding of the histories and futures of graphic communication, information organization, and the means of production.
Currently, I’m developing tools for a time-traveling design studio (Diplopoda Caracaras) that orchestrates wonderfully possible public protests, parties, and conferences where people can come together to discuss and plan around underlying issues of equality and freedom.
Covid19 context: I’ve looked to type, built a typeface called “New All American,” inspired by baseball and my collaboration with the #riotpop queer and immigrant empowerment-ing band, WASI.
11/19/19
Lorna Alkana mixes language and line drawings into interactive installations, speculative events, and found poetry. Post grad (USC, Creative Writing), Alkana taught middle school English, founded and co-hosted a weekly open-mic, and visually arted around Los Angeles and on her process blog (lornaphone.com).
In the MFA Graphic Design program at Otis College of Art & Design, she reevaluated and expanded her understanding of the histories and futures of graphic communication, information organization, and the means of production. Alkana began creating tools to build a time traveling design practice (@dplpdcrcrs) and to orchestrate speculative public protests, parties, and conferences where people can come together to discuss and plan around underlying issues of equality and freedom.
For the 2019 AICAD Conference, Alkana co-presented a music video essay, “SyllabUS,” to examine the college syllabus as a contract and the extent to which students fit in to the language of accreditation. She currently freelances and writes autobiographies in third person.
5/31/18
Hello!
My name is Lorna. I’m a writer, artist, educator, and learner. I live in Los Angeles. This blog visually traces much of the past seven years of my arting.
I mix digital drawings, typography, poetry, and pen into art to see on screens or on walls next to windows. I make books to read and doodle in.
Contact me for prints or commisions! LornaAlkana@gmail.com
2/26/18
Oh hello there,
This is where I explain myself and introduce the explanation in the first sentence. It’s almost March 2018, and I’m illustrating 23 artist portrait (4 ways) with The Love Story Project (Volume 2 of the coloring book/augmented reality/journal out soon), reading engaging books from independent publishers (which I’d like to document publically and visually somehow), learning about publishing and type-setting at Otis Books, and writing about creation, destruction, family, mold (all of it), and autobio specificity obfuscation.
I’m thinking art shows might happen this summer. I’m also thinking that a great art show would involve people just reading to themselves in the same room. Gorgeous.
6/2/2017
So far this year I’ve been up to my elbows in glowing installations, a Kickstarter with Operator Error, my tutoring gig, and a fitness plan. Oh, and I also published a book of poetry called, I Dated A Sociopath and All I Got Was These Poems.
I’ve peppered in some miles in regards to the LornaPhone ethos, and in the next few months, before I start grad school, I’d like to focus on her.
3/23/2017
Lorna Alkana mixes language and line drawings into interactive installations, digital art, paintings, and poetry. Her art explores themes of perception and expectation through surreal portraits and saturated skylines. Community, found-story, asymmetry, identity, and memory influence her work.
Lorna developed a love for genre bending collaboration while studying Creative Writing in high school at the Orange County School of the Arts. She graduated from USC in 2009 with a B.A. in English-Creative Writing and Cultural Studies. Right out of college, Lorna joined Teach for America to teach middle school English in San Fernando, California.
While teaching, she started an art blog to share her drawings, stories, and infographics. Since 2012, numerous galleries and venues in Los Angeles have featured her art, including the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, The Autry, and The Montalban. Lorna’s writing and illustrations have been featured by The Graphic History Collective, Repel Industries, and the Pop Culture Association.
Currently, Lorna continues to chronicle her “adventures in personhood” and art process on her blog, LornaAlkana.com. She bounces between Los Angeles and Orange County, where she arts, teaches, performs, and writes autobiographical blurbs in third person.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lornaphone/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lornaphone/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/lornaphone
Website: https://lornaalkana.com/
Portfolio: https://lornaalkana.carbonmade.com/
10/2/16
I know I’m going to have to clearly define myself in my upcoming grad school applications, so I’m going to enjoy this in between space where perhaps only I know who I am as an artist, and my art can speak for itself and you can speak with it, and I don’t need to find the right words for the ineffable, organic diffusion, experience, that I’m exploring, inviting, receiving and navigating. Hmmm actually that might work…
9/22/16
I ran out of business cards right before the Music Tastes Good festival. I had an installation there called “Found Windows”. I printed these 4 x 6 inch flyers to replace my cards for that event. People treated them differently, though. I call myself a, DIGITAL, INSTALLATION, VERBAL, and PERFORMANCE artist.
6/23/16
Sunstock Solar Festival “brief bio”:
Lorna Alkana is a writer and performer, she is a visual artist, she is a teacher, she has something to say.
Lorna Alkana’s art explores themes of asymmetry, community, process/creation, feminism, identity, and memory. Alkana’s art mixes play, perception, and perspective. She uses digital drawings and photography* to construct and reveal illusions, narratives, and the subconscious potential of skylines and city lives.
5/17/16
I write and perform. I visually art. I have something to say.
3/29/16
I am a writer and performer. I am a visual artist. I am a teacher. I have something to say.
1/25/16
Lorna Alkana Art made her Orange County debut this month! And with it…came a new artist statement! I tried to be as specific as possible, though the ideas are potentially quite abstract.
Here’s the spread:
The above proclaims:
Lorna Alkana’s art explores themes of asymmetry, community, process/creation, feminism, identity, and memory.
Alkana’s art mixes play, perception, and perspective. She uses digital drawings and photography* to construct and reveal illusions, narratives, and the subconscious potential of skylines and city lives.
*digital pictures
10/14/2015
Flux and focus. I’m getting better at being concise.
4/25/2015
Though I’m arting a lot these days, I’m conflicted. This blog is a place where I started to figure out my direction as an artist, and in the past few years, my trajectory has lead me away from it. that’s how time works, it seems, but something isn’t right. i miss figuring it out like i did when i didn’t know.
these days, i’m mainly arting in the form of photo editing/manipulation and pattern making. trying to get my many zine ideas together. balancing work and school (i’m clearing my secondary english teaching credential).
i’m stoked to host the Los Angeles Word Salon (LAWS) in Echo Park on Sundays. I draw its flyers based on photos from the salon. Feels good to draw.
I want to come home.
12/04/2014
This iteration attempts to boil it/me down
)
9/24/2014
I created this bio for my exhibition at the Frog Spot during the Frogtown Artwalk in early September 2014. It’s a repetition of my favorite, previous art/self-explanations plus a more concise and relevant summary of my origin story. No new self portrait, yet.
6/23/2014
I approach art with a love for process, interaction, ambiguity, symmetry, story, and the surreal. I represent female protagonists, moving clouds, and city stills.
I figure art is in the inbetween. In the gutters and in the gaps.
I bounce between Los Angeles and Orange County.
2/8/2014
I wrote this bio for the cover art that I did for Tera Vale Ragan‘s book of poetry, Reading the Ground, published by Word Works DC. [I’ll post the cover art soon! Tera’s book comes out this month! She is an AMAZING poet, person, peer, friend, everything. Her poems in Reading the Ground take the reader through her reconstruction of the narrative of her family’s immigration to Pittsburgh from Slovakia. Her words slow-down while also traveling backwards-in time, capturing different generations, landscapes, and journeys. Poetry is her bag, baby. I can’t wait to get my hands on the first edition! You can buy the book here.]
Lorna Alkana’s artwork uses layers of lines, colors, and language to create visual essays for a digital world. Lorna graduated from USC and is a Teach for America alum. She is the artist of a graphic biography of the French, feminist Suzanne Voilquin, A Solitary Path, published by The Graphic History Collective. Some of her other publications include A Surreal Coloring and Story Book and Windows: A Story Told Through Windows, Frames and Screens. You can find Lorna’s past and present art and writing on her blog (lornaalkana.com), where she discusses and animates her process. Lorna lives in Los Angeles, California.
10/10/2013
Note: I do have arms and there is only one of me.
Find me on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
My art is for sale, and I do commissions. Send me an email if you’re interested in some lorna-eyed art. lornaalkana@gmail.com
5/29/2013
— — — — — — — — — —
This is my most recent explanation of myself. I created a bio for the Hip Hipster’s Affordable Art Show (in LA in December 2012):
12/26/2012 – Lorna
11/28/2012
In the interest of full disclosure I figured I should post an actual photo and introduce myself. My name is Lorna Alkana, and I’m a 24 year old lady living in Los Angeles. I had a great high school experience in the Creative Writing conservatory at the Orange County High School of the Arts (OCHSA) in Santa Ana. I continued my writing pursuits at the University of Southern California where I majored in English-Creative Writing and took on a fabulous interdisciplinary minor in Cultural Studies. Since I loved reading and writing and talking about reading and writing I figured teaching English would be a logical next step, so I joined Teach for America in 2009. A lovely charter school in San Fernando hired me. I taught middle school English for over 2 years and worked relentlessly to develop curriculum, track student achievement, and get to know the school’s community, my colleagues, and the quirky little people who I taught.
When I was teaching, I always included visual aids to help students connect with the ideas we were discussing. If I couldn’t find images or graphic organizers that fit, I made my own. One of the most successful units I created was on comic books. As I helped my students develop an appreciation for graphic narratives, I also became more interested in the genre. I’ve always found (and heard) that I should write what I know. So here I am: looking for work, figuring out how honest I can be in my writing, and grappling with what it means to be an autobiographical cartoonist.
I like: Elizabeth Bishop, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Bechdel, Wertz, Vanessa Davis, Aimee Bender, strong female characters, surrealist games, creative collectives, intellectual conversation (is this douchey?), palimpsests, the writing process, poetry, reading aloud, grammar, chalking, and mild debauchery. I like a whole bunch of other things, of course, but I’m working on being concise.
June 2, 2012
May 28,2012
Lorna Alkana 