Stella Maria Baer is a painter and photographer from Santa Fe, New Mexico. In her work she explores her memory of growing up in the desert, tracing her origins back to the dusts of canyons where her mother took her camping when she was little. For the past ten years, she has worked to create a body of work with three veins: paintings of moons and planets, photographs of desert landscapes, and western mystic portraits of women and children riding animals under the western sky. Her practice looks at the relationship between how we see women and how we treat land, between memory and cosmology, in paintings made from dirt and rock, in the earth pigment bodies of women and children riding birds and horses at sunrise.

Stella's paintings and photographs have been featured by The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Time Magazine, Scientific American, Architectural Digest, Sunset Magazine, Westword, and ArtNews. Her pieces are in public, private, and museum collections all over the world.

Stella lives on a little ranch south of Santa Fe with her husband Seth and their three children, Wyeth, Whitman, and Winona, two horses they rescued from kill pens, an appaloosa named Moon and Stars and a baby pinto named Sky, and a flock of wooly goats.