Lu Zhang is an artist and cultural worker whose practice approaches institution building as a form of artistic inquiry. Across her artistic and organizational work, she develops collaborative infrastructures and new models of support that reimagine institutions as sites of creative and collective practice.

Lu serves as Executive Director of A Blade of Grass (ABoG), an artist-run nonprofit dedicated to nurturing socially engaged art through funding, publishing, research, and field-building initiatives. In collaboration with a paid artist board, she cultivates programs rooted in co-creation and dialogue. Under her leadership, ABoG continues to evolve to meet the changing needs of socially engaged artists.

Throughout her career, Lu has worked to build institutions that cultivate shared resources and new forms of collective cultural practice. Before joining ABoG, she served as Initiatives Director at United States Artists (USA), where she established a department dedicated to holistic artist support and led the development of major initiatives, including Disability Futures and Artist Relief. Previously, as Deputy Director of The Contemporary in Baltimore, she provided strategic leadership for the nomadic museum while advancing partnerships and initiatives that strengthened the city's cultural landscape.

Alongside her organizational work, Lu maintains an interdisciplinary artistic practice spanning books, drawings, installations, and site-responsive interventions. Her work explores relationships between memory, touch, attachment, and value systems through research-driven collaborations rooted in sites, archives, and material histories. She has collaborated with Press Press to make artist publications, partnered with the George Peabody Library to establish a studio residency program, and founded the Institute for Expanded Research, an initiative that creates new contexts and resources for artist-led inquiry.

Lu received an MFA in Painting from the Frank Mohr Institute in the Netherlands and a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art.