Lori Katz was relaxing at home on a recent Saturday when she received a Facebook message from a friend who thought he’d seen her work in the hit new Netflix show Inventing Anna. Katz flipped on her TV, turned to the show’s sixth episode, and there it was: her painting from years ago, along with a set of her ceramic squares on the wall of Laverne Cox’s fictional apartment.
Katz is a sculptor and painter who lives in Springfield, Va., and has a studio at the Torpedo Factory Art Center in Alexandria. Due to pandemic delays across show business, she wasn’t sure when the Netflix and Shondaland collaboration would be released, or if her artwork would make the final cut. After all, it had been years since a set designer for the series discovered her work at a showcase in New York City.
Not only was the show was released this month, it’s spent a week at #1 on Netflix’s global top 10 most-watched shows. Produced by Shonda Rhimes, the show is based on the New York Magazine feature about con artist Anna Sorokin, who pretended to be a wealthy heiress while defrauding hotels, restaurants, and banks out of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Two of Katz’s pieces were featured on the set of Inventing Anna: “Shadow Grid,” a 24″ x 24″ painting made with acrylic, oil, and wire, and an untitled, nine-square collection that’s similar to other pieces she’s become known for. In the scene, Anna Delvey (played by Julia Garner) has a meltdown and manipulates Kacy Duke (a real-life fitness trainer played by Laverne Cox) into letting her stay at her apartment, where Katz’s work adorns the walls.
“My work has been in other stuff, but this is just such a good show and the characters are so great,” Katz says. “It’s really fun to see Julia Garner and Laverne Cox in the same room as my work, even if they don’t know it.”
It’s true — this isn’t Katz’s first Hollywood moment. In the 2015 romcom Maggie’s Plan, Greta Gerwig and Julianne Moore conversed while holding tea cups Katz made. In 2017, set designer Daniel Kersting met Katz at an Architectural Digest design show in New York. The studio Kersting worked with purchased multiple pieces to appear in HBO’s Succession — so far, Katz has seen one in an expensive looking hallway and another in General Counsel Gerri Kellman’s office at the headquarters of Waystar Royco, the fictional conglomerate at the center of the show. In 2019, Kersting picked out the two pieces for Inventing Anna.
Katz isn’t the show’s only local tie. Actress Alexis Floyd plays Neff, a hustling concierge and aspiring filmmaker from D.C., inspired by real life District native Neffatari Davis, who also got wrapped up in Sorokin’s trail of lies.
Katz, who is represented by the Long View Gallery in downtown D.C., says her art is also set to appear in an Apple TV production, though the details haven’t yet been confirmed. The show placements haven’t led to a noticeable uptick in art sales, Katz says, but her family members, friends, and Instagram followers “think it’s really cool.”
She adds: “My big fantasy is that Laverne Cox loves my work so much that she wants to meet me.”
