Stephanie Stein was born and raised in New York City. She received a BFA in Printmaking from the Philadelphia College of Art (now University of the Arts) and spent a year studying at Temple University Rome and traveling in Europe and North Africa. She is working on a Masters of Human Development from Pacific Oaks College and has been working as an Atelierista ( art studio specialist ) in the field of Early Childhood Education for 15 years.

She lives and shows her work in Los Angeles and New York.

In her paintings, Stein offers for our consideration the sometimes uneasy coexistence of opposites: sky and earth, conflict and harmony, destruction, and creation. The work is pervaded by a sense of anxious longing to make the distance between the self and the busy confusions of the world.

Stein explains,

"I grew up in the dark, defunct (but totally alive) 1970s in NYC near the Metropolitan Museum of Art and I spent many cold and rainy afternoons staring at the paintings there. I always found myself totally transfixed by the enormous Chinese landscape paintings. They had a big impact on my work.

I have always had this thirst for looking at the land and they satisfied that longing. I like sending things out to sea, so to speak, to look at things from afar. The landscapes I paint are about a longing to locate myself in place and about the systems we create to orient our interiority in the exterior world. I think I'm trying to make sense of my scale on this earth and the impact or meaning that might have. The landscapes I paint are never from photographs. I like to paint what it would feel like to look out at that place. They are my attempts to comprehend the physical world intuitively.”