Stephanie Rond

Stephanie Rond (she/her/hers) is an internationally recognized painter whose work subverts and reimagines traditional expectations of space, place, gender and power. Guided by listening and sparking conversations, her practice activates female narratives in uncommon spaces and builds communities through creative collaboration. Rond develops street art and canvas paintings through a deeply tactile, materials-driven, hands-on process of designing, cutting, spray-painting and hand-painting impressions on layers of paper and photographs.

Rond’s street art brings a bright, otherworldly aesthetic to the outside’s most gritty spaces, offering an initial moment of visual reprieve followed by a revelation of each piece’s haunting subtext: Why does it surprise you that this is here? Her work in both indoor and outdoor spaces, both as an individual artist and as a curator, elevate a compassionate positivity that offers a safe space to ask hard questions—of the viewer, of the wider visual culture, of the environment in which a piece is hung, and of the artist herself.

Most recently, Rond has been honored as a Young Guns Art Award finalist (London), an exhibiting artist at Bienal de la Habana (Matanzas, Cuba), a TedX speaker and as the only representative of the U.S. Midwest portion of the global Google Art Institute: Street Art Project. She is the curator for Carnegie Gallery at the Columbus Metropolitan Library, and her work has been honored and exhibited extensively in Columbus, including at the Columbus Museum of Art. She’s created street art and murals in numerous national and international locales, including Vienna’s Wien Museum. As a prolific community arts leader, activist and collaborator, Rond has worked with multidisciplinary artists, elementary school students, plant nurseries, arts councils and collectives (she’s active in discussions of climate crisis with the international collective Micro Galleries), and an online community of female street artists from around the world, among others.

Rond is the founder of Women Street Artists (womenstreetartists.com) and S.Dot Gallery, a dollhouse that exhibits miniature art pieces and challenges notions of traditional domesticity as well as art accessibility. A short documentary about Rond's artwork, Tiny Out Loud, won Best Ohio Short Film (Columbus Film Council) and Best Short Documentary (WV FILMmakers Festival), and was an official selection in 20 international and national film festivals, including Boston, Cleveland, Las Vegas, New York, Portland, St. Louis, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington DC. She has developed and collaborated with the Greater Columbus Arts Council on the following programs: Sign Your Art (2017), Columbus Open Studio & Stage (2017, 2018), Art Spot (2022), and received GCAC individual artist grants in 2018, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023.