Tori Lepore
I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area wanting to, depending on the week, be a florist, a greeting card artist or a fashion designer. The last one stuck long enough that I nearly went to fashion design school.
Instead, I landed the traditional way, studying fine arts at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, then came home to the University of San Francisco for fine arts, art history and arts management. Along the way I interned at SFMOMA, proofread pages at Where Magazine, and then spent years as a personal stylist at Kate Spade (read: fashion design, adjacent).
Over a decade ago I took a ground floor job at Salesforce, making cold calls from a headset, which turned into a career in tech. Somewhere in there I spent a few years at Apple getting iPads into students’ hands, which felt like the closest thing to a full circle moment. My mom worked at Apple in the nineties, and I was in elementary school when those green clamshell laptops with the handles first landed in classrooms. As a product of public schools myself, I spent most of my career working with K-12 districts across New England and Washington, DC, which felt a little like going home.
Two kids later, I now live in the coastal New England town of Newburyport, Massachusetts. Abstract expressionism has fascinated me for as long as I can remember, and it’s where I’d happily spend all my time. In the meantime, I squeeze in art wherever I can find it, from museum hopping to making my children’s Halloween costumes to noticing the everyday beauty of New England, which is never in short supply.
The florist dream never totally faded. I keep houseplants on the theory that more is merrier, and wherever I live I garden and get to know the native landscape, a habit that really took root during a few formative years in Austin, Texas. At heart I’m still a Californian: a lover of red wine, a daydreamer about the fog, and the devoted keeper of a San Francisco sourdough starter.