Biography

Lori Weidenhammer (she/her), aka Madame Beespeaker, is a Vancouver performance-based interdisciplinary artist and educator. Lori’s career as an artist spans over three decades, covering a wide variety of media and approaches to performance, installation, and writing. Her work has appeared nationally and internationally, and a comprehensive essay on her work by Lois Klassen is included in More Caught in the Act: an anthology of performance art by Canadian women, 2016. (Edited by Johanna Householder and Tanya Mars.) Her art practise is based in eco-feminist theory and often uses humour as a tool to explore themes of internalized misogyny and ecological instability. For the past several years she has been appearing as the persona Madame Beespeaker, practising the tradition of “telling the bees”. She uses many art forms in her art practise including performance art, spoken and written word, garden designing, drawing, painting, collage, printmaking, cyanotypes, sculpture, photography, textiles, singing, culinary arts, video and installation.

As a food security volunteer, artist and activist Lori works with people of all ages on eating locally and gardening for pollinators. Lori is the author of a best-selling book called Victory Gardens for Bees: A DIY Guide for Saving the Bees published by Douglas and McIntyre. She is passionate about creating habitat and conserving native habitat for native bees and also reworking our food systems to be more sustainable. Lori is the co-creator (with Tyler Kelly) and co-curator (with Lincoln Best) of the B.C. Bee Tracker project on iNaturalist where she has helped ID over 10, 000 local bees. She is a founding member and current board member of the Native Bee Society of British Columbia and a recipient of the Entomological Society of Canada’s Norman Criddle award for her work as an amateur naturalist.

 

 

 Lori's website and contact info can be found here.