Alison Lohman won accolades for her first motion picture starring role as the teenage daughter of a prison inmate who endures a series of harrowing foster home experiences in White Oleander, in which she shared the screen with Oscar nominees Michelle Pfeiffer and Renee Zellweger and acclaimed actress Robin Wright Penn. The film screened at the 2002 Toronto Film Festival.

A native of Palm Springs, California, Lohman has been singing, dancing and acting in theatre since she was nine, starting with the role of Gretyl Von Trapp in a local stage production of The Sound of Music. Appearing in almost two dozen local theatre presentations, she won the Desert League Theatre Award as Most Outstanding Musical Actress for her title role in Annie.

She was offered a scholarship to New York University's renowned Tisch School of the Arts by the National Foundation for the Advancement of the Arts, but opted to pursue her professional career in movies and television instead, relocating to Los Angeles following her high school graduation.

She earned rave reviews for her performance in the telefilm Sharing the Secret, and starred in Mike White's series for Fox, Pasadena.