Lara Lepionka is a community-based artist and the founder and executive director of Backyard Growers, a non-profit organization connecting people to healthy food through school, community, and backyard gardens. She has exhibited her work in Chicago, New York, and New England, and was an artist-in-residence at Skowhegan School, Vermont Studio Center, and the Cultural Exchange Station in Czech Republic.
She received an Illinois Arts Council Artists Fellowship, a Northampton Arts Council public art commission, and was featured in The Object of Labor: Critical Perspectives on Art, Cloth, and Cultural Production published by MIT Press. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her BA from Bard College.