Lia is an art director and set designer, originally from Oregon. Growing up, she had a lot of time to watch movies while in the hospital and dreamed of making movies herself. As a teenager, she wrote and directed several short films starring her sisters, neighbors, and various inanimate objects, which can now be seen exclusively on VHS tapes collecting dust at her parents' house. She attended USC film school with a presidential scholarship. While there, she production designed a zombie musical short film called Zombo, which went on to win a student Emmy award. She fell in love with production design and became extremely popular with grad students in need of free undergrad design labor for their thesis films. She also double-majored in political science and did not sleep for four years.
She graduated from USC magna cum laude in 2010 and has been working in art departments of film and television productions ever since. She started in the indie world where she production designed dozens of microbudget projects, including a Lifetime movie about a homocidal nun ("salacious cheese" and "surprisingly bad" -IMDb user reviews). Eventually she made her way into the studio world and was accepted into the Art Directors Guild in 2016. In 2019, she was nominated for a Daytime Emmy Award alongside production designer Josee Lemonnier and set decorator Kelly Berry for Outstanding Art Direction, Set Decoration, and Scenic Design on the Netflix series Prince of Peoria. In 2020, she and the rest of the art department of the HBO series Euphoria, led by production designer Kay Lee, was nominated for an Art Directors Guild award. In 2023, a fun little movie she helped her friends on for a few days back in pre-pandemic early 2020, called Everything Everywhere All At Once, blew up and won a million awards including the Art Directors Guild award for Fantasy Film, and the Academy Award for Best Picture. Life is wild! Lia lives in Los Angeles with her furry roommate, Salami.