Lorie Hamermesh was born and grew up in Denver, Colorado. She attended the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied painting and printmaking and earned a Bachelor's degree in Painting. After graduation, she moved to Boston, where she started a family and pursued a Studio diploma at the SMFA part-time while raising her children. Hamermesh says that while she hadn't developed her unique voice until her time at the Museum School, her work has always been process-driven rather than conceptual, with meaning emerging over time. Upon graduating from the SMFA in 1984, Hamermesh won the Fifth Year Traveling Scholarship to study Mughal miniature paintings in India. 

Throughout her practice, at different degrees of directness, Hamermesh has explored the themes of identity, repressed sexuality, childhood trauma, objectification, and the lasting impact of societal expectations women are conditioned to fulfill. While her medium has changed significantly over the decades, fluctuating between oil and mixed-media on canvas, then moving onto collage, etching, and paper-based work, the imagery has remained focused on the female body in its various stages of growth and exposure. Before the central figure, oftentimes clad in a white dress, appeared in the decade of the 1990s, the female body was often defined by its conventional surroundings: a girl's room, a closet filled with ruffled dresses, a parlor, a bureau with its drawers wide open, the chaos of motherhood spilling onto the viewer. There is a tenderness there, conveyed through florals and pastel colors, bright shades only the sunniest of windows could cast, but also darkness: on the wallpaper, men lurk behind the bushes, beneath the children's stage, a snake, in the distance, a house on fire; the Lynchian tension between perfection and decay.

Female garments and other signifiers function as representations of womanhood: a tree, a bouquet, a cut flower. As someone who left her Mountain West home young and built a life elsewhere, Hamermesh has expressed feeling uprooted, which is reflected in her work through her use of family archives, collaged or painted, and through metaphors. A connecting thread between the series is a form of rawness, sexual or otherwise, and the way it is expressed through the game of revealing and concealing, the suggestion of seduction, and the violation that is the act of touching. While most of the time, Hamermesh has specific references behind the work, she encourages the viewers to form their own interpretations and says that she is never entirely set on the meaning of a particular piece.  

After pausing her practice to work through her artistic block and the lingering emotional conflicts, Hamermesh says she returned to printmaking, which proved to be cathartic; monoprints and works in mixed media now form the majority of her practice. Her most recent body of work, while enigmatic, has a more meditative quality and reflects on aging and the clarity that comes from lived experiences. Outside of her studio practice, Hamermesh spends her time gardening, creating flower arrangements, or doing laps at the pool.