Sonali Arnaz Mehta-Rao is a South Asian American visual artist whose interdisciplinary practice explores identity, ecology, and ancestral memory as interconnected and continuously evolving processes. Through her practice, Sonali navigates shifting notions of belonging across geographies, cultures, and spiritual traditions. In June 2026, she will participate in the Evolving Identities programme at Studio 88 Artist Residency.
Sonali Arnaz Mehta-Rao’s interdisciplinary practice explores identity, ecology, and ancestral memory as interconnected and evolving processes. Rooted in a diverse lineage—Parsi-Zoroastrian, Bengali-Christian, and South Indian-Hindu—her work emerges from lived experiences of cultural multiplicity, migration, and in-betweenness. Raised in the United States and based in India for over a decade, Sonali’s practice reflects an ongoing navigation across geographies, cultures, and spiritual traditions, shaping a deeply relational understanding of belonging, memory, and place.
Alongside her artistic practice, Sonali has worked extensively as a social entrepreneur, collaborating with rural communities, artisans, and farmers across India. Her work in sustainable agriculture, craft revival, circular economies, and women’s leadership has brought her into close engagement with ecological knowledge systems and community-based practices. These experiences continue to inform her artistic inquiry, grounding her understanding of identity through land, lineage, collective memory, and human connection. Sonali currently divides her time between the Himalayas, Mumbai, and Vermont. She has recently completed residencies in the Himalayan region, including the Manang Residency in Nepal and the Dot Line Space Foundation residency in Sikkim, where she developed new directions in her work exploring ritual, landscape, and ecological memory.
Sonali’s visual practice is rooted in spiritual inquiry and ecological consciousness, exploring identity as fluid, porous, and continuously transforming. Drawing inspiration from sacred ritual, ancestral knowledge systems, and the natural world, she works with abstraction, organic textures, elemental forms, and earth-based palettes to trace cycles of creation, dissolution, and renewal. Her work reflects a sustained inquiry into how identity is shaped through memory, displacement, inheritance, and evolving relationships with land and community.
At the center of her practice is an exploration of the divine feminine through abstraction and organic imagery. Through this lens, she seeks to dissolve inherited binaries—human and nonhuman, self and other, past and present—inviting viewers to experience identity as interconnected and alive. Her process is intuitive and meditative, informed by practices such as Hatha Yoga and Vipassana meditation. Through layering, material experimentation, and deep observation, each work becomes a space for reflection on how identity is carried in the body, shaped by environment, and continually reimagined through lived experience.
During her four-week residency at Studio 88 Artist Residency under the Evolving Identities programme, Sonali will develop a body of mixed media works and process-based studies under the working title Becoming Through Texture: Identity as a Field of Relation. The project explores identity as an evolving and layered experience shaped through awareness, environment, memory, and embodied experience. Rooted in meditation and ecological inquiry, the work will translate daily observations of landscape, material, and internal states into textured visual compositions that examine the relationship between mind, body, and place.
The project brings together two interconnected strands within her practice: identity as relational and ecological, shaped through land and cultural memory; and identity as perceptual and impermanent, observed through meditative awareness. Working within the environment of Doi Saket, Sonali intends to investigate how unfamiliar yet resonant landscapes influence perception, sensation, and belonging. Using texture as a visual language, she will explore how states such as stillness, fragmentation, clarity, and transformation can be expressed materially through painting and mixed media processes.
More about Sonali Arnaz Mehta-Rao on her Instagram.
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