Steph Mantis
Principal
Steph Mantis, Inc.
Steph Mantis is a Brooklyn-based designer, educator and creative consultant. Best known for her Forever Pizza Slices and Cat Butt Magnets, her versatile work focuses on adding play and humor to everyday objects. Raised in her family’s Biddeford, ME pizzeria, her work explores the relationship among food, object and culture.
She studied industrial design at Pratt Institute and glass design at the Danish Design School, and has collaborated with such notable institutions as Pizza Brain Museum, Pizza a Casa Pizza School, Scott’s Pizza Tours and Slice Out Hunger—with most of her products produced and distributed by Kikkerland.
What The Food?
We came to Parsons hungry for design. Last fall, Tucker Viemeister, FIDSA, and Steph Mantis co-taught a product design class based on the foods they love. The studio began with the designer’s favorite dishes.
They replaced arbitrary project briefs with menus of guiding principles derived from the culinary delights. Analysis of a dish’s physical attributes, history and personal meaning became the foundations for each project. They avoided literal transposition and the projects emerged in many physical forms—from furniture, housewares and interiors to culinary arts—or even material explorations.
What was once chewed on, is now visualized; essence captured. Taste the designers’ commitment that this process brought to each project. After all, we are what we eat.
