Red Lodge Clay Center- Short Term Resident (AIA) 2025
Stefani Threet is a ceramic artist, mentor, and community organizer based in West Philadelphia. She is the founder of Ceramic Concept, the city’s first Black woman-owned ceramic gallery, which from its opening in November 2020 became a vital hub showcasing over 200 artists—primarily artists of color, women, and local creatives—while fostering workshops, mentorship, and community dialogue.
Stefani’s work explores themes of cultural identity, utility, and connection through atmospheric firing techniques such as soda, wood firing, and electric kiln processes. After stepping away from gallery operations in 2025, she has refocused on her personal studio practice, exhibiting new work at prominent venues including NCECA, and continuing to support emerging artists through mentorship and collaborative residencies.
A graduate of Alfred University’s renowned ceramics program, Stefani has over 15 years of experience as an art educator and ceramic arts instructor. Prior to dedicating herself full-time to her studio practice, she served as a program manager for Philadelphia’s Mural Arts Program—a role that, upon its conclusion, catalyzed her transition into a full-time pottery career and the launch of her own line, originally Threet Ceramics, now known as Stefani Threet Ceramics. Her work is sold online and through museum shops, galleries, and gift shops nationwide.
Stefani is a seasoned artist-in-residence, having participated in numerous residencies and work exchanges at ceramic institutions across the country. She also spends several months each year in Oaxaca, Mexico, where she draws inspiration and expands her artistic practice during working vacations.
Clay is my language of resilience, memory, and reclamation. As a Black woman and ceramic artist, I am deeply committed to using clay to explore the complexities of identity, cultural lineage, and the embodied experience. My practice is rooted in storytelling, memory, and community, and I create sculptural and functional forms that explore resilience, joy, and the generational wisdom embedded in material culture. Growing up in West Philadelphia, I draw on ancestral traditions and personal experience, using clay as a language of care, beauty, and transformation. Clay is my medium for community and truth. I’m committed to both pushing its possibilities and mentoring others on that journey. Atmospheric firings, especially wood and soda are central to my process, echoing the unpredictability and emotional depth of lived experience. Surface becomes a skin, bearing carved, layered narratives that speak to labor, tenderness, and resistance.
As the founder of Ceramic Concept, a gallery dedicated to uplifting artists of color and local makers, I’ve witnessed the power of clay to build community and challenge dominant narratives. Though I’ve returned to the studio full-time, that ethos remains: I make work that bridges the personal and political, that honors imperfection, and that reclaims the ceramic object as a vessel for truth, history, and radical imagination.