Photograph by Harmon Li
"...our community’s needs, struggles, and knowledge are aggregated, disregarded, and appropriated. Our bodies and minds are used but not seen or understood. Through both traditional and expressionist portrait painting techniques, I intentionally place our bodies as the subjects of my work."
Isabel Lu, MPH, RD, (she/they) is a Chinese American visual artist and health equity researcher born and raised in North Carolina. Isabel studied Western nutritional science as an undergraduate student at Cornell University and then public health and dietetics as a graduate student at UNC Chapel Hill. They were one of the 2023 Emerging Artists-in-Residence at Artspace, where they are now a studio artist.