Sophie Chao is an artist and designer based between Pittsburgh and Baltimore. Working across disciplines, she brings together her love of textile art, graphic design, oil painting, and branding to create work that bridges the gap between fine art and visual communication.

Design Work:

As a designer, Sophie is passionate about graphic and brand design. She has worked freelance on projects ranging from social media branding to publications.
She recently worked as a Design Intern at Redscout, and at the start up app Creator vault as the sole designer

Artist Bio:

Sophie Chao  Earned her BFA from Carnegie Mellon University in 2025, studying visual arts and design, and has since been based in the Baltimore area.

Sophie works between mediums. As a textile artist and Oil painter her work combines materials into large scale multimedia compositions

Born in Sanfransisco but raised in Maryland Sophie has ties to both the East coast and the West. Her background as a multicultural, Korean Chinese Swedish American has shaped how her work critiques American consumption. Her practice often revolves around themes of American Iconography, the overt masculinization of Western Media, and the exploitation of Asian Feminitity.

Tying in traditional craft techniques, such as Swedish appliqué, East Asian kite making and Korean embroidery, her work questions contemporary constructs of masculinity often perpetuated throughout American media. The meticulous hand stitched process seen in her work is contrasted against her use of mass produced imagery.

Her work have been shown in multiple gallerys such as as Alt Projects in Los Angeles, Maryland Art place in Baltimore, XO gallery in Baltimore, the Tomayko Foundation in Pittsburgh, and the Frame Gallery in Pittsburgh.

In 2024 She studied oil painting in Florence Italy at Syracuse University and fiber arts at the Lorenzo De Medici arts program. She has since been the recipient of 2 Grants from the Frank Ratche Further Fund, and was awarded the Samuel Rosenburg Award for excellence in the Arts in 2025.

In 2026 she will attend the Vermont Studio Center as an Artist in Residence.