SIEMON & SALAZAR STORY
A journey that began with a shared passion for glass, art, design, and a deep appreciation for the natural world.
Siemon & Salazar is a lighting design studio founded by Caleb Siemon and Carmen Salazar. The duo have been working together to design and make hand blown glass lighting and art objects in Southern California since 1999. They met while undergraduates at the Rhode Island School of Design where Caleb focused on glass and Carmen on sculpture.
Caleb grew up surrounded by a family of artists and designers in Southern California. His early immersion in the arts led him to take a glass-blowing class in high school where he fell in love with the medium. He honed skills in college and as an apprentice in Murano, Italy, for master glass blower and sculptor Pino Signoretto. In 1999 Caleb returned to California determined to carry on the centuries old tradition and open his own studio. Friends, including Carmen, travelled from all over the world to help him realize this vision and it was during this time that the collaborative mindset was instilled in the studio's ethos.
Carmen was raised travelling between the wilds of West Virginia and Washington, DC. At home in both worlds she finds beauty and inspiration in the quiet of the woods and the vibrance and culture of the city. At RISD, while exploring architecture, sculpture, and photography, she too became captivated by glass as a medium. After college, drawn to California, she apprenticed for artists, glassblowers and botanists in San Francisco, a city known for its beauty and creativity. When Caleb asked her to help him build the studio she accepted and there began their life as a couple. In 2001 the intersection of her diverse interests led her to the Southern California Institute of Architecture. After receiving her masters in architecture at SCI-Arc in Los Angeles, and then working in the architectural world, she officially re-joined Caleb in 2008 to launch Siemon & Salazar.
The brand was born after a decade of creating collectible design objects when the pair launched their first lines of hand-blown glass lighting inspired by their vessel and object collections at the 2009 New York International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF). It was during this time that Caleb and Carmen met the founders of Laguna Beach based Cerno who were also just beginning their journey as a lighting company. Friends and colleagues in the lighting world for a decade, the acquisition of S&S by Cerno Croup in 2022 was a natural evolution in a relationship marked by camaraderie and collaboration.
Caleb and Carmen moved their studio equipment into Cerno’s factory and built out the same Italian style workshop that the team had used for the previous 20 years. Every member of the S&S production team moved with them and all the work in the studio is made on site one at a time by a group of people that are dedicated to their chosen medium and craft. The couple remain involved in the studio as Directors of Design developing new products for the brand.