Štefan Straka was a Slovak painter who was mainly devoted to ethnographic themes of the area around Trenčianska Teplá.

During World War I he fought on the Italian front, after the war he studied at the Academy in Budapest (1919), then from 1920 to 1923 in Prague, first at the Academy of Arts and Crafts and then at the Academy of Painting under Prof. Vratislav Nechleba. In 1928 he spent a longer period of time in Paris for study. After his studies he worked in his native village. At the end of January 1932 he was hit by a car in Bratislava and subsequently succumbed to his injuries and died.

In his early years as a student, he was a landscape painter, but after his return to Trenčianska Teplá he worked exclusively on portraits, group compositions and folk genre scenes.