Stephen Towns (1980, South Carolina) lives and works in Baltimore, MD. He trained as a painter with a BFA in studio art from the University of South Carolina and has also developed a rigorous, self-taught quilting practice. 

In 2018 the Baltimore Museum of Art presented his first solo museum exhibition, Stephen Towns: Rumination and a Reckoning. The exhibition went on to travel to artist Mark Bradford’s gallery Art & Practice in Los Angeles. His second solo museum exhibition, Declaration and Resistance, toured three US museums from 2022-23.

In 2025, Towns was the first artist to participate in the relaunch of Gilcrease Museum’s artist-in-residence program. In 2024, Towns won a Baker Award from The William G. Baker Jr. Memorial Fund and the Mary Sawyers Imboden Prize, the top prize from the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance. In 2021, Towns was the first African American artist-in-residence at the Fallingwater Institute, located at Frank Lloyd Wright's renowned Fallingwater house in Pennsylvania. In that same year, he was also awarded the Maryland State Arts Council’s Individual Artist Award. 

Towns’s work has been featured in publications such as the New York Times, Colossal, Artforum, the Washington Post, Hyperallergic, Cultured, Forbes, AFROPUNK, and American Craft.

Towns’s work is in the collections of Art + Practice (Los Angeles, CA), the Baltimore Museum of Art (Baltimore, MD), the Boise Museum of Art, (Boise, ID), the City of Charleston (Charleston, SC), the Flint Institute of Arts (Flint, MI), the Huntington Museum of Art (Huntington, WV), the National Museum of African American History and Culture (Washington DC); the National Portrait Gallery (Washington DC); Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (Kansas City, MO), the Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African American Art (Asbury, NJ); the Rockwell Museum (Corning, NY); The Westmoreland Museum of American Art (Greensburg, PA); the Wichita Museum of Art (Wichita, KS), and is held in private collections internationally.