Divya Pamnani is an artist based in Bombay practicing a syncretic form of visual story-telling drawn from traditional art forms of India, inspired by a love for playful and intricate pattern making.
Divya has studied Psychology for her undergraduate education at the University of Texas at Austin (2007) and has a Master’s in Public Health from the University of Michigan Ann Arbor (2011); she lived in the United States until 2014 and worked in the non-profit sector until she decided to pursue a full-time studio practice in 2020. Divya spent a summer at the New York Academy of Art and Design in 2018, where she explored paths to abstraction under Peter Bonner, and developed a drawing practice with Samuel Adoquei. She has done a Post Graduate Diploma in Indian Aesthetics (2019) and coursework in The Art of the Book in South Asia (2021) at Jnanapravaha, a Theory Art Education Institute in Bombay. Concurrently in 2019, she pursued training in the Indian Miniature painting technique from Master Artist Mahaveer Swami in Rajasthan, a proponent of the Bikaner School of painting.
All the self-sought course-work, academic and technical, have helped her hone in on the practice of Miniature Painting, as a foundation for developing a unique visual vocabulary. For the last 4 years, Divya has been focussed on just that, developing a visual language by building on the rich legacy of miniature paintings. She is a professional scuba diver and the aura of the deep blue beyond often informs her subject and colour palette.