Bio

Sharmistha Ray is a New York-based independent visual artist, writer, curator, activist and public speaker working in the field of contemporary art. She has exhibited her work globally in New York, Singapore and India, and prior to this she was the Managing Director of Bodhi Art, an international gallery for contemporary art based in her adopted city of Mumbai, India with branches in Delhi, Singapore, Berlin and New York. She managed more than 100+ exhibitions of contemporary artists at art fairs, galleries and museums around the world, initiated critical new partnerships, stimulated private/public art collecting, and oversaw the gallery’s curatorial, educational and publishing platforms. She is widely regarded for her pioneering role in building new structural and dialogic frameworks that put contemporary art from South Asia on the global map. Between 2007-2008, she was on the gallery search committee for Art HK: Hong Kong International Art Fair (now Art Basel in Hong Kong); in 2011, she was the inaugural Sales Director, Asia for Hauser & Wirth; and from 2013-2014, she was the VIP Representative, India for Art Basel.

Sharmistha’s reviews on contemporary art appear in Hyperallergic, Ocula and Artcritical. In 2018, she was a guest art critic on the December edition of REVIEW PANEL, a panel of established art critics in conversation about topical exhibitions, at the Brooklyn Public Library. In 2015, her public art work made of steel, ON THE SEASHORE OF ENDLESS WORLDS, was the most instagrammed work at the Kala Ghoda Festival 2015, the biggest public arts festival in India, and is now in the privately held collection of JSW, the largest steel conglomerate in India. In 2014, she was selected by the Berklee College of Music to create an original art work to celebrate the Grammy and Academy Awards-winning musician, A.R. Rahman, for a tribute at Symphony Hall, Boston.

HIDDEN GEOGRAPHIES, her critically-acclaimed and commercially successful debut solo exhibition in Mumbai in January 2012, fused abstract painting with personal identity and themes of desire, sexuality and pleasure. She was featured concurrently in the India edition of Vogue’s “Vogue Vibe: What To Talk About This Month.” She has also been featured numerous times in the print and online India editions of Elle, Harper’s Bazaar and Grazia, and appeared in Forbes and FT: How To Spend It as an art expert. Between 2016 and 2017, she traveled WE ARE ALL ISLANDS, a solo project of new drawings, installations and sculptures addressing alienation in a digitally-mediated world, to Mumbai and Kochi during the 3^rdedition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, in India.

A TED Fellow and public speaker, Sharmistha is an advocate for LGBTQI+ causes and gender equality in the art world. She gave a TED Talk in Whistler in 2013 about the public and private crossroads of art, gender and sexuality and was on a panel at SXSW in Austin, Texas about gender biases against women entrepreneurs in 2019. In 2015, she was one of the faces of UNGENDER, a campaign by Elle in collaboration with FOCUS, a city-wide photography festival in Mumbai, on gender non-conformity and expression. From 2014 onwards, Sharmistha has run BELLEVUE SALONS, a project she founded to encourage interdisciplinary cross-pollination and collaboration as strategies to dismantle art world hegemonies and build new ways of thinking about art.

Additionally, she has received numerous awards for visual art including the Montblanc Young Artist World Patronage Award (2012), Joan Mitchell M.F.A. Grant (2004) and BiGLaTA Award (1998). She was nominated for the Civitella Ranieri Fellowship for Visual Arts (2014). Sharmistha is a graduate of Williams College and Pratt Institute with multiple honors, and currently lives and works in New York.