Contact Lana at LanaPortolano@gmail or through her website LanaPortolano.com.

Lana Portolano grew up in East Texas. After college in the 80s, she moved to the DC area to earn a Ph.D. in rhetoric at the Catholic University of America. During grad school, her first professional job was editing visitor information and exhibits directories for all Smithsonian Museums and the NGA. After writing her dissertation on the origins of the Smithsonian Institution, she faced a crossroads: rather than pursue a vocation writing about art, she chose to become a humanities professor. Since retiring from academia in 2021, however, she has returned full time to her earliest love, art...this time as a practicing painter.

As a portrait artist, Lana's focus at the NGA has been Baroque and Impressionist portraiture. Informed by her lifelong study of biography, poetry, and character-rich fictional narrative, she strives to learn the magic of capturing human likeness in paint. Her primary aim is deepening her sensitivity to the life and character of an individual and expressing that in skilled traditional and modern representational styles. From studies using methods that are as close as possible to the master's original process, she hopes to venture soon into exploratory interpretations, making her time in the copyist program a true conversation with each master painter she studies.