About​​​

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Devika is an interdisciplinary artist and credentialed art psychotherapist based in Bangalore, India. Trained in psychodynamic practice, she holds a Master’s in Art Therapy from LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore. In her therapeutic approach, she brings a person-centred and trauma-informed lens, paying close attention to each individual’s pace, needs, and lived context, and offering a space grounded in safety, attunement and care.

 

During her clinical training, Devika worked with children and adolescents living with chronic illnesses, rare degenerative conditions, and developmental disabilities, alongside their families and caregivers. She has additionally supported women and children survivors of domestic violence at a crisis shelter in Singapore. Over the years, Devika has facilitated therapeutic art sessions and creative wellbeing workshops for children and adults from diverse backgrounds. Her collaborations include projects with institutions such as St. John’s Medical College Hospital, India Foundation for the Arts, and the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art. In 2019, Devika founded Saya, a therapeutic art space and community open studio in Bangalore.

 

Devika’s own artistic and curatorial practice explores art as a restorative, rehabilitative medium; expressing collective themes of invisibility, illness, memory and impermanence within personal and shared human experience.  Devika presented her exhibition “Essentially Normal Studies” around invisible illnesses, as a keynote speaker at the MYOPAIN 2018 medical conference, and in 2020 as an interdisciplinary guest lecture at Ashoka University. She has written pieces around art, disability and accessibility for Marg Magazine (2021), Art India Magazine (2021), and Skin Stories, Point of View (2018). Her work has also been published in The Third Eye, The Indian Journal of Medical Ethics and Dark n' Light Magazine.

 

Devika is an Inlaks Fine Art Awardee 2020 and a Prince Clause Fund Seed Award Recipient 2021. . In 2022, she received the IFA Arts Research Grant from the India Foundation for the Arts, to research and document oral histories of women navigating  female specific pain, illness and experience, within Indian medical spaces. 

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Devika work and research has been presented in exhibitions, fairs and festivals across India, including the Kochi Muziris Biennale, Serendipity Arts Festival, India Art Fair, among others. She was selected among 9 other Seed Awardees to participate at the Prince Claus Fund Mobile Lab ( 2022) at Documenta15, in Kassel, Germany. 

 

Devika has a Bachelors in Contemporary Art Practice from the Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology. She previously pursued her undergraduate in liberal arts at Sarah Lawrence College, New York, specialising in Anthropology, Art History and Visual Arts. 

 

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Workshops conducted 2019 - 2025 : Images | Gallery

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