I’m Rupa Shankar, a multidisciplinary artist based on New York.

For twenty years, I worked as a design leader — Amazon, Etsy, CLEAR, Estée Lauder — solving other people's problems, managing teams, sitting in meetings. I was a designer who had somehow stopped designing anything with my hands. In 2024, after two decades of that, I left to make things again.

I grew up in Mumbai, where kolam — the threshold drawings made fresh every morning outside South Indian homes, swept away by evening by wind and dust — was just part of what a day looked like. I didn't think much about it then. Now it's the quiet logic behind almost everything I make: repetition, symmetry, the idea that nothing has to be permanent to be worth making with care.

My ceramic work is maximalist and nature-inspired — carved surfaces, layered glaze, forms meant to be touched and used, not just looked at. My paintings return again and again to kolam's geometry, built in color and pattern across large canvases. Different mediums, same instinct: make something, let it go, begin again.

I hold an MFA in Graphic Design and an MBA in Marketing from Boston University, and a BFA from J.J. Institute of Applied Art in Mumbai.

Color is the other language running through this work. Growing up in Mumbai — where my mother's saris were a daily education in what color could carry — it was never decorative. It was meaning itself: devotional, communal, historically coded. That inheritance moved with me. In my paintings, color accumulates the way form does in my ceramics: each layer added slowly, in relationship to what came before, until the whole holds a particular weight. A sense of calm. Of having arrived somewhere.

I have lived this logic too. Across seven cities on two continents — each move a kind of erasure, each one a beginning. I came to the United States just before September 11th, the first woman in my family to cross those distances, and I have been crossing them ever since: geographies, careers, languages of making. I have learned to trust this too: tomorrow's drawing is made possible by erasing today's.