Stephanie Sara Lifshutz is an artist and educator residing in Brooklyn, NY. She first began working with glass and neon while attending the University of Wisconsin, Madison as a graduate student. While much of her work comes from a personal place as a female, Jewish artist, Lifshutz’s latest body of work has been about universal experiences and emotions. Lifshutz initially studied photography and printmaking at Franklin & Marshall College and became infatuated with portraiture. She continued taking portraits of friends and acquaintances and soon realized the importance of the conversations that took place between herself and the subject in the privacy of the studio, especially while her face was hidden behind a camera. The conversations and shared time became more intimate as each subject would begin chatting and then reveal more of themselves, and that experience eventually became more important than the photograph taken.
She began learning neon in earnest in order to make some new work in the medium herself, struggling to learn while appreciating the time and process as a reference to the tedium and meditative nature of the darkroom. Lifshutz’s studio practice first focuses on concept and subject matter before deciding which medium to realize the piece, and neon felt like a natural progression to edit down a concept to its simplest form - directly communicating it to the viewer.
Lifshutz’s work has been exhibited nationally, including the Phillips Museum of Art at Franklin & Marshall, Museum of Neon Art, and Aqua Art Miami. She has work in the traveling show She Bends curated by Meryl Pataky, the first and only collective of womxn bending their own neon. Her work resides in various collections including Oregon College of Art & Craft. Stephanie keeps an active studio practice in addition to her teaching, and currently runs her own neon fabrication shop, Pumpkin Studios.
