Shanthi Chandrasekar was born and brought up in Tamil Nadu, India. She studied Physics at Women’s Christian College, Chennai and then her Masters in Psychology from Annamalai University, Chidambaram.
Shanthi is a self-taught artist who has been drawing and painting since early childhood. Her interest in understanding different media has led her to experiment with sculpture, photography, and printmaking. She has also been trained in the traditional art form Tanjore Style painting. While many of her works are influenced by her Indian heritage, her true inspiration comes from the mystery and majesty of the world around her; her muse lives where the scientific overlaps with the spiritual.
Shanthi’s main focus is concepts and she tries to understand them better through exploration and experimentation. She has been working on themes like space, time, dreams, music and languages. She is constantly learning to work with various media to best express her ideas. She also does a lot of research on the subject before starting a project.
Shanthi’s works have been displayed in a variety of locations throughout the Washington D.C. area, and she has won numerous awards for her paintings as well as her sculptures.
Shanthi received the Maryland State Arts Council 2013 Individual Artist Award for Works on Paper. She has also won the Individual Artist grants from the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County, MD in 2009 and 2013. She received the Maryland Traditions Master Apprentice Award in 2010 to teach the Indian art form of Kolam.
Shanthi won the gold and the fan favorite medals in a competition conducted by the District of Columbia Arts Center called the DC Art Decathlon in 2012. She was one of the four semifinalists selected to work on any theme in ten different media during a period of six months. The ten media specified by the gallery were drawing, painting, collage, photography, sculpture, printmaking, fiber art, conceptual art, audio and video. Commentators who were assigned by the gallery covered the progress on a blog (http://dcacdecathlon.wordpress.com/). As a result of this competition, she was awarded a solo show in January-February of 2013, which was curated by James W. Mahoney. Shanthi continued on the decathlon theme for the show and created work in the ten different media. Mark Jenkins wrote a review for the show in the Washington Post dated 1st February 2013.
Apart from the above awards, Shanthi also won the Best in Show and the Urquhart Awards in the Art League juried shows in 2012 at the Torpedo Factory in VA. Her Kolam paintings were juried in for the Bridges Math Art show in conjunction with the international conference held in 2012 at Towson University. She also participated in the Artomatic shows in 2012, 08 and 07. Her Red Dots drawing on paper was part of a travelling exhibition Erasing Borders by the Indo-American Arts Council, NY. She also had a solo show of drawings on paper titled Red Dots at the Art League in VA in 2011. Shanthi’s work has been exhibited in many galleries and alternative spaces in the region.
Shanthi has also been giving presentations and conducting workshops for schools and other groups like the Osher Lifelong Learning Institution (American University chapter) at the Gandhi Memorial Center in Bethesda, MD and other venues. Some of her presentations include Kolam and the Arts and Crafts of India. She is also the Indian Art teacher at the India School in MD where she introduces the students to various forms of Indian traditional and folk art like Madhubani, Gond, Warli etc.
She is currently the exhibits director for the galleries at the Takoma Park Community Center. She has been displaying shows that include established, emerging and new artists who are from the DC area and also local to the community. Some of the shows are themed like the Mathematically Inclined, which she has curated.
She offers classes and workshops in the DC metro area. She is a teaching artist and community scholar and listed on the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County roster.
Shanthi works from her studio at Pyramid Atlantic, Georgia Avenue, Silver Spring, Maryland.
