Meet Lydia - The Artist
Lydia Kann
Lydia is a visual artist and a writer. Fall 2025 she published a graphic novel, Germaine’s Daughter, containing 100 large scale paintings and text about the legacy of war and debilitating illness over three generations. She exhibits the paintings from the project at galleries in L.A., where she lives. Lydia returned to Paris for a two-month residency Summer 2025 at the Cité Internationale des Arts, where she had a yearlong residency 2017-2018 and conceived Germaine’s Daughter.
Lydia writes fiction and nonfiction including short stories, essays, novels and memoir. Many are stories of women and men overcoming adversity — psychological and external challenges such as poverty, illness, immigrant life, war, and gender conflict. She is interested in both the personal/domestic and the historical/sociological experience.
My creative work leans toward storytelling. The concept for Germaine’s Daughter was built on extensive research into my family history in Poland and France before and during WWII in Europe. I traveled to Poland to find our roots in the shtetl, then to Paris to feel the excitement of my parents’ political activism and the eventual loss of the dream when the Germans occupied. I went to the South of France to visit the camp where I was told my mother was imprisoned, and then to the small town where she spent the whole war on her own, exchanging favors for working papers. Finally, I wove the threads into the graphic novel.
The subject matter and materials overlap in Lydia’s art and writing. The work in both is made on and of paper and circles themes of power and adversity, acknowledging the relationship of the individual to the natural world and to the complicated realm of human connection.
Kann has made art and written since her childhood in New York City and Los Angeles. Her day job as a psychotherapist deeply influences her creativity. Listening to stories and finding effective alternatives with patients helps her envision multiple ways to convey an artistic concept and to dive deep in expressing emotion.
Bicoastal her whole life, Kann moved to Western Massachusetts after college, and recently returned to L.A. to fulfill her lifelong dream of waking and painting to the sound of the sea.