Divya Pamnani
Divya Pamnani (b.1983) is an artist based in Mumbai 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.
During her time training, she got to witness first stand the studio practice of a traditional Master Artist, how he prepares brushes, pigments and surfaces, reminiscent of the Mughal and Rajput painting ateliers she studied about in her coursework in The Art of the Book. 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 3 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.