Christian Stella spent his early years fascinated by technology and learning a multitude of skills that would eventually form his outlook that you can achieve anything with the right amount of passion, research, and practice.
At the age of 14, he joined his friends in creating an award-winning filmmaking company, Queequeg Films. Their two feature-length horror-comedies The Bags, and The Robert Cake went on to compete in several film festivals across the country, winning no less than a dozen awards. Queequeg Films' The Robert Cake was written by Christian at the age of 16 and filmed on a budget of less than $1,000, yet still went on to compete in festivals as large as The Sarasota Film Festival, where it competed against Oscar nominated films with budgets in the millions. Queequeg Films were considered one of the best film companies in the exploding scene of amateur filmmaking that opened up just as digital video and computer editing were bringing the process to a wider variety of people. This was all many years before streaming video and websites like YouTube made amateur filmmaking a mainstream form of media.
At the age of 17, Christian took an interest in music production and recorded, mixed, and mastered the Ryan Winford album Too Delicate to Be Thrown in the bedroom of his parents' house. More recently, he mastered Ryan Winford's What Time Will Change EP, which is available on iTunes. The hard copy of the CD was designed and illustrated by Christian and Elise and is available on CDbaby.com.
Two years later, Christian launched a weekly fiction blog at www.Ribcage.org where he posted a new short story every week. The site ran successfully for more than two years as over 100 short stories were written and posted to an average of 5,000 readers a month. Creating and self-publishing two anthology books of the Ribcage short story series was Christian's first foray into typography and book design. Stories from the Ribcage series were also published in Look-Look Magazine and Facets Literary Magazine, where they were nominated for The Pushcart Prize.
During this same creative period, Christian fought back against his early struggle with obesity and lost over 160 pounds, more than half of his body weight. His family became one of the greatest successes of living a low-carb lifestyle, losing a combined total of over 560 pounds. His life took a quick detour as he and his family found themselves in the national spotlight, appearing in newspapers, magazines, and on dozens of television shows like The View, 48 Hours, Entertainment Tonight, The Insider, and an hour-long special on The Food Network. He appeared regularly on his father, George Stella's, Food Network cooking show Low Carb and Lovin' It that ran for 2 seasons.
At the age of 19, Christian made his first move into cookbooks when he co-authored his father's second book, Eating Stella Style, which was published nationally by Simon and Schuster.
Photography (especially food photography) is Christian's newest passion, a logical extension of his relatively new career in cookbook design. He is now 26 years old.