ABOUT SAMANTA TELLO

ARTIST STATEMENT

I’m an artist born in Spain and based in San Francisco for over two decades. My creative journey has long centered on the voices of women and girls, and the grounded inner strength that resides within them. With a love for minimalism, I’ve explored themes of resilience, sisterhood, and identity through pyrography, wood stains, gold leaf, and other mixed media.

In recent years, a deepening spiritual practice has profoundly reshaped how I perceive the world and what I aim to express through my art. Teachings rooted in presence, self-inquiry, and the stillness beneath thought have opened new dimensions in my creative process.

My work now seeks to create a space where visible gestures point toward the invisible. This evolution has allowed for greater abstraction, while still keeping the feminine figure as a guiding thread. She becomes a doorway into something more universal — our shared consciousness.

BIO

Samanta Tello was born in Barcelona and raised in Madrid. Her passion for art and graphic design led her to study Fine Arts at the Complutense University of Madrid. In 2001, she moved to San Francisco, where she continues to live and work, returning regularly to Spain to reconnect with her roots.

Tello’s work has been featured in The de Young Open at the de Young Museum in San Francisco (2020 and 2023). She painted one of the iconic 400-pound Hearts of San Francisco sculptures and has been featured twice by SFMOMA's Tumblr. Her piece Silenced Voices of Everyday Sheroes was used by the Sorbonne University of Paris for a conference on epistemic injustice. The same work received the So to Speak Feminist Journal of Language and Art award and was featured in Yale Insights magazine.