Stephanie Shih
OSGF
Interdisciplinary Residency, Five-Week, Session II
Stephanie Shih (史欣雲) is a photo-based multidisciplinary artist, known for her painterly use of shadow applied to playful perspectives on food and its surrounding cultural histories. 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 draws on her background in cognitive science research to co-opt and recode the symbolic systems of the art-historical still life canon, investigating the on-going construction of diasporic identities and experiences in the U.S. In her work, Shih mines the histories of objects as well as institutional object collections, excavating the ways in which microcosmic individual identities are shaped by macrocosmic societal forces across time.
Shih has completed residencies at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2025), Oak Spring Garden Foundation Interdisciplinary Residency (2024), Museums at Washington and Lee University (2023), and Joshua Tree Highlands Artist Residency (2022). Her recent solo exhibitions include little eats at Candela Books + Gallery, LONG TIME NO SEE at Museums at Washington and Lee University, and FLOURISHat Los Angeles Center of Photography. Shih's work has been featured in outlets including Lenscratch, 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.