Lorien Hunter Ph.D.

The Professional Story

Lorien Hunter is a writer, researcher, and aspiring world traveler who is captivated by all things related to media, people, culture, and community. She has been published in both popular and academic spaces, including the Washington Post and the Journal of African Media Studies. She founded a weekly column for Bi.org titled The In-between, where she combined theory and storytelling to explore notions of culture and identity as they relate to her experiences as a queer biracial woman. She then went on to develop and launch Queer Majority for the American Institute of Bisexuality, where she developed series including The Business of Sex Profiles and Painted Stories to build community and drive engagement through storytelling. Today she feeds her love of stories as the Director of Curation and Content Strategy for the EdTech company Bookelicious.

Lorien holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. in media studies from the University of Southern California, and a B.A. in Sociology from Arizona State University. Her dissertation examined the recent expansion of the African Middleclass and corresponding developments in African hip hop, to determine how technological, social, economic and political transformations in Sub-Saharan Africa since the 1990s known as “Africa Rising” have altered what it means to be African.