Stephanie Maria is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans painting, assemblage, installation, and found-object work. A lifelong artist, she began painting at five and has spent decades exploring the expressive possibilities of pigment, surface, color, and materiality. Her extensive experience as a decorative artist deeply informs her fine art practice, where richly layered surfaces and unexpected materials become vehicles for storytelling and social commentary.
As a second-generation Mexican American, as well as with paternal lineage from Poland, Stephanie Maria draws deeply from her ancestry, exploring themes of identity, cultural memory and erasure, environmental anxiety, and the objects and ideals we preserve. Her work often juxtaposes European decorative traditions with Mixtec patterns, using ceramic figurines and fine china with images of semi-automatic guns, while figurative paintings feature men with air rifles posing with flip flops while on snow banks to question political tensions within our divided country. Across surreal landscapes, abstract and narrative paintings, assemblages, and sculptural works, she expresses beauty while channeling a collective grief, unease and rage over environmental destruction, political instability, and the erosion of human rights.
She received her diploma and BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts, in Boston. She lives and works in New England, in her pondside studio and centenarian home with her husband and wildly energetic dog Shiloh.