Petra (Peter) Lommen is a transgender visual artist whose work has long explored identity, transformation, and the tension between visibility and erasure. Active since the 1970s, Petra was among the early openly transgender artists in the Midwest, creating work that addressed gender questioning and personal authenticity at a time when such subjects were rarely discussed publicly and often met with hostility. She earned both her B.F.A. in 1979 and M.F.A. in painting and drawing from the University of Minnesota in 1984  and has exhibited her work widely since the early 1970s.

From early on, her artwork often explore archetypal images of women as a form of metaphorical self-portrait, layering celestial imagery, vintage costume references, and poetic composition to express a personal creative feminine energy. Inspired by the dark skies and northern lights of northern Minnesota's Boundary Waters, she returns again and again to starscapes and galaxies as symbols of mystery, transformation, and identity. Through abstraction and symbolic portraiture, her art expresses the experience of existing in the margins, seeking beauty and truth in the expansive space between self and society.

Beyond her studio practice, Lommen has worked in both art and science education, including significant work in paleontology and at the Science Museum of Minnesota, experiences that sharpened her sense of visual detail and narrative in her paintings.

She continues to build an ongoing visual autobiography, inviting viewers into a universe where gender, memory, and the cosmos are closely intertwined.

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