Lorette C. Luzajic is an award-winning Toronto-based artist whose work has been collected in more than 40 countries, including Canada, USA, Netherlands, Estonia, Belgium, Saudi Arabia, Germany, France, Australia, Puerto Rico, Peru, Israel, Tunisia, Qatar, Scotland, Spain, Mexico, and beyond. Her work was featured in an ad for Carrera Y Carrera, a Madrid based luxury jewelry company. She has been featured on the cover of two textbooks at university presses, on several book covers for poetry and short fiction. She was also part of an arts symposium in Tunisia, where she created works for the Ministry of Culture with other artists from all over the world. Lorette's art took first place and a $5000 award in a painting contest with Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment in Toronto. She has been a jury member for the City of Barrie Arts Awards and three times for the International Boynes Arts Awards out of Australia. Her work has been exhibited in galleries, museums, hotels, offices, restaurants, a laundromat, a 20 foot billboard in New Orleans, the Berlin Metro, and the Royal Ontario Museum. A large piece was recently purchased for the permanent collection of The Union Hotel in Toronto.

Lorette is also a writer, and both her art and her writing are fuelled by her passion for art history. She earned a bachelor of applied arts in journalism. Her essays, poetry, and stories are mostly about or inspired by art. For many years, she wrote a column for Good Food Revolution on Wine and Art, then on food and art lore. Her writing has been nominated frequently for the Best of the Net, Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, and Best American Food Writing. She was twice awarded in the Best Small Fictions anthology. She is the founding editor of The Ekphrastic Review, the flagship journal of literature inspired by visual art.

Lorette teaches collage and mixed media, art appreciation, and creative writing through The Ekphrastic Academy, Women on Writing, and Art Cart at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. She is a breast cancer survivor.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

I am driven by eclectic curiosity, and by the joy of juxtaposition. My work is a curiosity cabinet and an apothecary of magic potions and spells. It is poetry, and a surreal dream. It is the frantic pace of the city and the magnificent silence of the night. It is about love and death and the sacred and inane, and the absurdity and beauty in all things.