Bio
Stephanie Shih (史欣雲) is a visual still life artist (photo and multimedia installation), known for her painterly use of shadow applied to playful perspectives on food. Shih started making photographs with her dad's half-frame camera on childhood road trips, but only returned to photography seriously while in graduate school. At the time, she moonlighted as a wedding cake maker,and translating the fantastical experience of food to the visual image has been a driving throughline of her work ever since.
As a second generation Taiwanese-Chinese American, Shih explores intersecting contemporary and historical cultural dynamics of diaspora communities through her still life creations, drawing on her background in semiotics and cognitive science research to recode the symbologies of the still life canon. Shih has completed residencies at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation Interdisciplinary Residency (2024), Museums at Washington and Lee University (2023), and Joshua Tree Highlands Artist Residency (2022). Her work has been exhibited in recent solo shows at venues including USC Pacific Asia Museum, Museums at Washington and Lee University, and Los Angeles Center of Photography. Shih's photography has been featured in outlets including Lenscratch, Bloomberg Businessweek, Gastronomica, Buzzfeed News, Audubon Magazine, and Los Angeles Times.
Shih is from the San Francisco Bay Area and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. When not in the studio or kitchen creating, she is a professor at the University of Southern California.
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