Photo: Cydni Elledge

From Lauren to Lo — and Everything She Built Along the Way

Lauren Harris has always been a storyteller. Long before the clients and the campaigns, she was a kid in Alabama writing short stories — and her mother noticed. At thirteen, she enrolled Lauren in the Alabama School of Fine Arts in Birmingham, where she studied creative writing intensively for six years. She graduated in 2014 as a Gold Medal recipient in fiction writing from the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards — along with an Honorable Mention from the Alabama High School Literary Arts Awards and an Honorable Mention in Princeton’s National Leonard Milberg ’53 Secondary School Poetry Contest. Those early honors told her something she already suspected: that words — and eventually images — were how she was meant to move through the world.

In 2014, Lauren enrolled at Northwestern University to study Broadcast Journalism and Integrated Marketing Communications. She threw herself into campus life — joining the student chapter of NABJ, and finding a second home at WNUR, Northwestern’s student-run radio station. At WNUR, she built a media team from scratch, launched a performance series called WNUR Airplay (think NPR Tiny Desk, but Northwestern), and produced micro-documentaries about local Chicago artists.

She was learning, in real time, that storytelling wasn’t one thing — it was everything.

Her internships during those years took her from the Chicago Reporter to the Spiegel Research Institute to Bustle Digital Group to the New York Times video team, where she worked as a motion design intern. She was building a toolkit she didn’t yet have a name for.

She graduated in 2018 and joined the NBC Page Program, completing three rotations: HR and talent branding at NBC headquarters, the promotions team at WNBC, and NBC News Now — a brand new OTT platform she got to watch being built from the ground up. After the Page Program, she joined NBC News’s Stay Tuned as an associate animator, spending a year and a half creating graphics and animations for daily news and breaking news coverage.

Then 2020 happened.

When George Floyd was killed, Lauren was in the newsroom — a Black woman, processing grief in real time while the world watched. She picked up a pen. She started drawing. She had been quietly posting art on a separate Instagram under the name Lo — a nickname, kept deliberately apart from her professional life — an account that was never meant to be found. She published a piece called Justice on that account: a woman with her fist raised, a COVID mask on her face, the word Justice above her head. She went to sleep. She woke up and it had gone viral.

The commissions started coming in. Cosmopolitan. Amazon Prime Video. Then dozens more. The world had found the account — and with it, the name. Lauren Harris had built the foundation. Lo Harris was who emerged from it. She transitioned from the newsroom to full-time commercial illustration — in quarantine, on her own terms — and she hasn’t looked back since.

In the years since, her original artwork has reached people far beyond the screen: more than 150,000 units of retail merchandise — t-shirts, apparel, and stationery carrying her designs — have been distributed in stores across the country, including Target, Five Below, Old Navy, and Kohl’s.

In 2022, Lo applied for an opportunity through CC:DC — Can Diversity Collective — to attend the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. She had no idea what she was walking into. What she found was a room where global decisions about media, marketing, and narrative get made — decisions that shape the way entire communities see themselves — and she realized that most of the people most affected by those decisions don’t even know those rooms exist.

That experience changed her. She went back the next year. And the year after that. She eventually co-directed the CC:DC Ambassador Program for three years, shepherding nearly eighty individuals through the same transformative experience she had been given — helping them see themselves not just as creatives, but as global citizens with a seat at the table. She currently serves as Director of Community, working to build C:DC’s broader ecosystem beyond the Ambassador Program.

In 2023, Lo joined the Innocence Project as their Design Lead — a role that grew into Creative Lead. She owned the full creative output of the organization: communications materials, photo and video shoots, website projects, and even the design of their expanded office space. She worked the death row campaigns of Marcellus Williams and Robert Roberson, developing visual strategy and grassroots communications to keep audiences informed and activated during some of the most urgent moments of those cases.

What she learned there reinforced something she had always believed: creativity is not a luxury. It is essential — especially in the places that most want to make change. The organizations that embrace creativity are the ones that maintain connection, keep relevance, and generate impact. And the ones who resist it lose touch and leave new audiences on the table. Her time at the law firm was illuminating. She left with her convictions intact and her voice sharper than ever.

Lo is now freelance and open to new collaborations. She just got married. She is settling into a new chapter — and she is looking for partners who believe what she believes: that inclusion is a leadership practice, that creativity belongs everywhere, and that the best work is the work that actually means something.

If that sounds like you, she’d love to hear from you.