Stephanie Deshpande

Deshpande is involved in promoting recognition of women in the arts. From 2016-2018 she chaired the New Media Relations committee of the Portrait Society of America's Cecilia Beaux Forum. Her articles about the importance of classical training in the arts have appeared in Artists on Art Magazine and on the Cecilia Beaux Forum blog. Her work has been included in several Women Painting Women gallery shows and in the Women Painting Women: In Earnest museum exhibition which traveled from the Clarksville-Montgomery County Museum in Tennessee to the J. Wayne Stark Galleries at Texas A&M University.

In 2016, Deshpande was one of the nine artists, including Mario Robinson, Judy Takács, Laur Tilden and Terry Strickland, who participated in the Emanuel Nine Portrait Project at Principle Gallery, honoring the victims of the Charleston church shooting. She painted the portrait of Myra Thompson, one of the nine victims. In 2018, Deshpande was commissioned to paint a portrait of Cynthia Graham Hurd to be displayed permanently in the Cynthia Graham Hurd St. Andrews Library Branch in Charleston, South Carolina.

Deshpande works in oil, painting figures, portraits, narratives, florals and still lifes. She often uses chiaroscuro to create a dramatic tone in her paintings. Her work is inspired by John Singer Sargent, and deals with personal allegorical themes.Her depiction of female characters is realistic and focuses more on an internal dialog than on the external beauty of her subjects. Her themes often include playing cards, games, electricity, light/shadows, dolls, children, religion, and the dynamics between people. In The Fall (2013), Deshpande explores darker themes inspired by life and dreams. Using a predominantly warm palette and closely related values in The Fall was a choice Deshpande made to "up" the thematic intensity but also to establish the figure as having an equal part in the narrative as the child's toys. The young girl in the painting is Deshpande's daughter. It is an intimate scene Deshpande imagined one day in the car, but it is also slightly sinister, made all the more so by Deshpande's other inspiration for the painting—a nightmare in which she witnessed a child falling to the ground (that child is represented by Raggedy Andy).

Deshpande attended high school in Massachusetts, and completed a BFA with honors in painting at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1997. In 1996 she studied at the Ingbretson Studio in Framingham and was instructed in the Boston School method by Meg Mercier. She was awarded the Ellen Battell Stoeckel Fellowship to attend the Yale Summer School of Music and Art in 1996. She continued her studies at the New York Academy of Art, earning her MFA in 1999. While attending NYAA, she studied under Vincent Desiderio and Steven Assael. She is an instructor at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey and at the Teaching Studios of Art on Long Island.

Stephanie Deshpande (born 1975) is a contemporary American painter, best known for her portraits and narrative paintings. She currently lives in northern New Jersey.