Our Guiding Purpose

Stelo illuminates the power of art to invite conversation and build community. We are dedicated to responsive models of support via partnerships, collaboration, and exchange.

EMERGENCE

We nurture the creative process as a cycle of becoming. By engaging with a diverse spectrum of creatives and organizers who are deeply committed to growing their artistic and cultural practices, we embrace intuitive and experimental possibilities.

CURIOSITY

We believe that making is an offering to think more deeply and to approach the world with respectful curiosity. We offer access points for artists, staff, and communities to converse, listen, and learn from one another.

COMMUNITY

Our communal interbeing invites us to share what we have and ask for what we need. In this cycle of exchange we focus on both emergent and enduring needs to strengthen the ecosphere.

CARE

We embrace radical love that recognizes our individual and collective lived experiences. We center care in our interactions to foster inclusive, intersectional, and equitable spaces.

PLACE

By advocating for healthier relationships with land and people, we root our work in connection to place. We seek to co-create a sense of place, and of belonging, with the creatives we support, our neighbors, our partners, and our peers.

Creatives + Artists We Serve

We’ve supported over 150 artists working both with local to Oregon creatives, as well as folks from Spain, California, New Mexico, New York, Texas, Montana, Florida, Illinois, Minnesota, Washington, and Alabama. This group includes multi-disciplinary makers, painters, poets, sculptors, photographers, performers, musicians, papermakers, social practice practitioners, writers, eco-activists, audio artists, ceramicists, video/media artists, individual makers and collaborative groups. They were invited, selected via open calls, and recommended to us via partner orgs. They are students, emerging artists, mid-career, and established creatives. The common thread across this community is that they are all deeply committed to their creative practice. The primary way we engage with artists is through our residency programming. Supporting artists + being responsive to their needs, is the heart of our work.

Meet Our Team

Stelo Arts + Culture Foundation is a program of the non-profit family foundation, c3:initiative.

Rory Sparks | Stelo Co-leader: Residency, Public Programs + Education Focus

  • Rory Sparks engages in a creative practice that merges the roles of artist, administrator, and educator. She has a strong interest in collective thought and arts ecologies, and a background in traditional craft. She is now considering how to use art as a tool to reconnect the hand not only to tradition, but also to the earth and the communities we form, in ways that are relational, responsive, and, ultimately, regenerative. She began working with Stelo Arts in 2018.

Shir Ly Camin Grisanti | Founder, Interim Co-leader with Programs Focus

  • Shir Grisanti is a mother, a feminist business-woman, and a rewilding land steward. A German-Jewish Latinx/Israeli immigrant, Shir founded the arts nonprofit c3:initiative (now Stelo) to support the production of art while facilitating community engagement between individual artists, arts and cultural institutions, and the public. Her work is guided by the philosophy that society moves toward greater social justice through individual growth, collaboration, and community-building.

Stacey Tomanelli | c3:initiative Administrative Lead

  • Stacey Tomanelli joined the creative team of Stelo and sister org Camp Colton in June 2018. Since graduating high school Stacey has held a full time job in the administrative field. She received her Bachelor's Degree in Liberal Studies at SUNY Purchase College while working and attending classes in the evening. She is a mother of two boys and multiple animals. Stacey has always been interested in the arts. Her mother was an artist and she grew up using art as a way of expressing herself. Stacey enjoys working with talented people who inspire her.

Will Mairs | Stelo Operations Coordinator

  • Will Mairs (they / them) joined the Stelo team in May 2023 as an operations coordinator. A computer scientist now turned book- and zine-maker, they like to wear many hats and get up to odd things. Through their printmaking and publication work they look towards playful spaces of uncertain aesthetics, and are trying to learn more about anticapitalist means of production and distribution. They earned their MFA through PNCA’s Print Media program and hold a BS in Computer Science from Tufts University. These days they like to spend time tinkering with their risograph MZ790 and designing nerdy color charts.

 

Our Board of Directors

Shir Ly Camin Grisanti

Laurence Grisanti

Monica Camin

Carlos Camin

Anthony Grisanti

 

Contact Us


Our Advisory Council

  • Karim Hassanein is an interdisciplinary, values-driven design professional committed to supporting civic engagement and creating a more just world in everything they do. Karim works and thinks at multiple scales, from storytelling to event coordination to urban design, with a commitment to excellence and tangible positive outcomes for the organizations and communities they serve. Karim is motivated by hope for a liberated future, and strives to democratize organizational structures. All of this is fueled by Karim's love of complexity and the ways that embracing uncertainty can lead to radical change.

  • Bukola Koiki is a Nigerian-American multimedia fiber artist whose work upends reductive tropes of the West African immigrant experience by interpreting the liminal spaces she inhabits between two very different cultures. As a descendant of the Yoruba people and a product of a "formerly" colonized country, Koiki's work is conceptually guided by contemporary and archival research used to discuss themes such as homesickness and belonging, rites of passage, cultural objects of power, sociolinguistic phenomena, the messy past and afterlife of colonialism, and more. Koiki’s multidimensional works reflect her material and technical curiosity and include hand-pulled prints from embroidered collagraph plates, giant beads employing Nigerian hair threading techniques, handmade and hand-dyed paper, Tyvek head ties dyed in indigo, amongst other explorations.

    Koiki holds an MFA in Applied Craft + Design from Pacific Northwest University and a BFA in Communication Design from the University of North Texas. She was nominated for the Textile Society of America's 2020 Brandford/Elliott Award and was named a 2019 Finalist for the American Craft Council’s Emerging Artist Award. She has exhibited nationally and been featured in American Craft and Surface Design magazines, Art21 Magazine online and has been interviewed on NPR. She completed the AICAD Teaching Fellowship from 2017-2019 at MECA&D and the Fountainhead Fellowship in the Craft/Material Studies Department at Virginia Commonwealth University in 2020. She has been awarded residencies at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts and at The Hambidge Center. Koiki is currently the Inaugural Bates Collaborative Artist in Residence and Lecturer in the Humanities at Bates College in Lewiston, ME through May 2022.

  • Niema Lightseed (she/her) is a poet and priestess of life dedicated to inviting personal and collective transformation through embodiment education, language, art, and ritual. An artist since childhood (BFA Theatre Performance, Roosevelt University, 2002) and a healing professional since 2004 (Hatha Yoga Teaching, Temple of Kriya Yoga, 2004; Massage Therapy, East West College of the Healing Arts, 2017), she writes and performs medicinal poetry, offers therapeutic bodywork and creativity coaching, teaches about the role of somatic awareness in the liberation process, creates community ceremonies, explores the relationship between gravity and social justice, and seeks the marrow of life through a variety of meditative and creative disciplines. As a fat Black woman navigating the intersection of multiple forms of oppression while determinedly seeking the joy that is our true nature and living as art, she strives to create safer spaces where the oppressive structures we have inherited can be transmuted and the work of seeing, accepting, and celebrating the fullness of the human experience is possible. www.thebodypoetic.com

  • Diana is a Colombian artist, educator, and arts programmer transplanted to Portland in 2019. Her work incorporates visual research, popular culture analysis and collaborative learning processes in publications, workshops, parties, or curatorial projects as a framework to investigate the relationships formed between a place and those who inhabit it. With her practice, Diana is interested in subverting hegemonic structures by cultivating spaces to invite people to slow down, think together, share questions, and play more.

  • Mami Takahashi is an artist from Tokyo, currently a resident in the US. Using photography, performance, installation, and urban intervention, her practice explores the complexities of being an Asian woman living in the US.

    Previous exhibitions and performances have taken place at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco Art Institute, The International Museum of Art, El Paso, Southern Alberta Art Gallery in Canada, Gwangju Folk Art Museum in Korea, Instituto Municipal del Arte la Cultura in Mexico and Toriizaka Art Gallery in Tokyo, among other venues. She holds an MFA from Portland State University and a BFA from the Joshibi University of Art in Japan. Takahashi is a recipient of the Ford Family Award for the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art residency program. https://mamitakahashi.art | IG @umerumamiescription

  • Marcelo Fontana is an artist, curator, and organizer from São Paulo, Brazil, based in Portland. Fontana’s research focuses on understanding the relationship between people and photography and how the massive production of images affects and influences our world. As an organizer, his goal is to create meaningful connections between communities developing culture forward projects.

    With BFA in Photography (Senac-Brazil), Fontana is one of the founders of Wave Contemporary, a member of Carnation Contemporary, and was part of the artist incubator group Prequell and Atelier Fidalga. Marcelo has worked as an assistant for the artist Shirley Paes Leme, made art shows in Brazil, Japan, Korea, and the USA, and was part of The Ford Family Foundation & PNCA Leland Iron Works, LABMIS(Brazil), and WeWork residencies.iption

  • Catie Hannigan (They/she) is a queer poet and visual artist whose work incorporates poetry, book-making, and installation. Their books are MOON’S CABIN (dancing girl press 2019), Water Fragments (Tammy Journal 2017), and What Once Was There Is The Most Beautiful Thing (DIAGRAM 2015). They currently teach the Poetry Track of the Portfolio Program at the Independent Publishing Resource Center in Portland, OR. More of their work can be found at www.catiehannigan.com

Karim Hassanein

Bukola Koiki

Niema Lightseed

Diana Cuartas

Mami Takahashi

Marcelo Fontana

Catie Hannigan

Stelo is a 501(c)(3) non-profit private operating foundation. We offer support via programs rather than grants.

Embedding Equity + Repair

 

We are committed to growing our organization in order to share power and co-create an environment that is not only accessible, diverse, equitable, and inclusive but is also actively anti-bias and anti-racist. In 2021 we began using an equity lens to more effectively guide decision making away from known systems of harm and towards a culture of repair. To us, equity means that everyone is cared for. Embedded in that care is an acknowledgment of the different experiences of privilege and oppression in our culture and our community. We also acknowledge the foundational and systemic biases in our organization and throughout society.

Stelo engages with partners via invitation and periodic open call. We are interested in supporting the creation of art via residencies, exhibitions, and public programming.

We embark on partnerships when they are in alignment with our values and annual goals. Our partnerships are rooted in co-creation of programs.

We encourage you to read our partnership FAQs to get a sense of the resources and support that Stelo has to offer. At this time we are not looking for new partnership programming.

Our Partnership Program