“Creature of Habit” acrylic paintings by Stephanie Fiorino

Stephanie Fiorino was an art major at Manhattanville College- her main medium being photography. She works in the Bronx in a NYC public elementary school and has been teaching visual art for 14 years. She had 4 students' work exhibited in the PS Art citywide exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of art and 6 in the Bronx Borough arts festival at Lehman College Gallery.

During the pandemic the school lost one of their assistant principals to Covid. Stephanie led a team to paint a mural in her memory that is on display in the school. During the process she found herself challenged and enjoyed painting sea animals with texture- February 2023 Stephanie lost her mother and found having a side project this summer kept her mind busy and was a channel for healing- She chose to ask her immediate family what their favorite animals were and then challenged herself to paint them in a large-scale format with lots of attention to texture. Stephanie also enjoyed making an abstract background with Klimt like patterns and colors. She found that removing the choice of which animals to paint created an exciting challenge. The first two paintings were a Great Horned Owl for her son and a Rabbit for her husband.

Stephanie is hard of hearing and uses ASL and English. "I believe art is a universal language". She currently resides in Rye Brook with her husband Sam and her son, Myles.