Stella Marguerite Loveland was born on March 23, 1890, in the town of Winchester in Orange County, California. She received her degree from the Los Angeles State Normal Teachers College and taught art for eleven years in the Riverside, Imperial, and Long Beach school systems in Southern California. Around 1921, she moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and began working as a designer for California Faience Pottery in Berkeley, which had been founded in 1915 as "The Tile Shop."

California Faience closed in the 1930s during the Depression. Stella probably studied at the California School (College) of Arts & Crafts in Oakland with printmakers William S. Rice and Cora Boone, who had learned the white-line method of woodcut in Provincetown from Blanch Lazzell. Her tile design worked well with the white-line method and she proceeded to create a number of very fine color woodcuts.

Stella Loveland married Benjamin Warner Towne in Berkeley on July 26, 1923. They had one daughter, Mary Elizabeth, born in 1925. Stella died in Oakland, California in October of 1986.