About

Welcome to my digital art studio! Thank you so much for stopping by. My name is Mariateresa Aiello.  My friends call me Miti. I am an artist, architect/designer, professor (architecture/design, history of architecture, history of art, drawing and rendering and non-western traditions), poet and, sometimes, a deejay. I love coffee shops, collect pens and my tastes in life, as in music, are eclectic. The best way to describe this blog is that it represents a curated version of my life, filtering what I see, read, write, think about, do, listen to….and experiment with. Here is a collection of mental bookmarks and fragments of life, a catalyst for creative pursuit and occasional intellectual discourse.
These are my field notes. You can search my portfolio of work through the tabs on top of the page, and by clicking through  the Categories side-bar in the Home section (for work since 2009, when SketchBloom was started).

I was born in Milano, where I spent half of my eighteen years in Italy. The other nine were spent in the South, in Calabria, in a small, rugged town by the Ionian Sea inhabited by strong, passionate people.  I am a product of deep northern and southern Italy: my mother is from Veneto, what once was the province of The Serenissima Republic of Venice and my father is a warm Calabrese. My high school was a Linguistic Lycaeum and my formative ‘ingredients’ were languages, comparative literature and poetry, art, philosophy. Mine was an education steeped in the humanities. I collect quotes and i like this one: ‘ Italians are sea-faring people, a nation made of poets, artists, heroes, saints, thinkers, scientists, wanderers.’

From Italy to North Dakota? How is this possible? For all those who have asked me this question-and will do so in the future- here is the spiel. I will just refer you to this page from now on, as it’s hard to sound fresh when I heard myself telling the story for the nth time . SO here it is…
I came in the U.S as a foreign exchange student at sixteen, and lived a year in tiny Breckenridge, Minnesota. I finished my high school degree in Italy (we have a five-year high school ’cause we are smarter) and returned to North Dakota at nineteen to study Architecture and Art.

So…you are Italian and studied Architecture and Art in North Dakota? What can I say, I like to do things differently. I enrolled in the Architecture program at North Dakota State University, in Fargo, still managing to take lots of Literature and Poetry classes. After earning my BARCH, I stuck around for a degree in Fine Arts.   I currently live between sunny San Diego, California, where I have worked  for few years in Architecture and Academia and the city, San Francisco.  My year of magical realism was 2006-07 when I went back to Italy, to Firenze, for a Master in Architecture and Urban Design with Syracuse University.

Please let me know if you have any questions by submitting a comment or emailing me (below). I love to read your comments: they let me know you stopped by! Share my site with other creatives and THANK YOU for the support!

email : sketchbloom [at] gmail [dot] com

I am also founder of  ArchistDesign Studio (in the works!), a design consulting company.  There you can find my portfolio of architecture work, projects and CV.

Thank you so much for visiting!