Manjari Sharma

Manjari Sharma makes work rooted in portraiture, addressing themes of race, memory, identity, multiculturalism, and personal mythology. She was born in 1979 and raised in Mumbai, India. After completing an undergraduate program in still photography and audio production, she moved to the United States to pursue a second Bachelor’s degree in Fine Art at the Columbus College of Art and Design.

After relocating to New York City, Manjari gained recognition for her first long-term project, The Shower Series. With this series, she began exploring the intersection between the materiality of water and the inner landscape of the human mind. Works from The Shower Series were widely published, exhibited, and featured in galleries and festivals around the world. A decade later, expanding her artistic practice, she continues to explore similar ideas through sound, motion, and projection in her new series titled Surface Tension.

Her project Darshan, a photographic reimagining of Hindu deities, received international acclaim and was featured by The New York Times, Vice Magazine, CNN, LA Times, The Huffington Post, and NPR, among others. Darshan was also published as a limited-edition book in the “One Book Series” by Nazraeli Press. In 2017, the Metropolitan Museum of Art commissioned Manjari to create a collaborative series titled To See Your Face, which received favorable reviews in The New York Times by art critic Roberta Smith. The project has since been exhibited at several institutions, including the Louisiana Museum of Art in Denmark and Kunsthalle Mannheim in Germany (Fall 2021).

Beyond her artistic practice, Manjari is deeply committed to teaching and fostering diverse creative communities. She has guest lectured and critiqued at institutions such as the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), The Rubin Museum of Art, Asia Society, Emory University, Carlos Museum, the School of Visual Arts, and Maine Media Workshops (Fall 2021).

Manjari’s work is held in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Carlos Museum, and the Birmingham Museum of Art, among various private collections. She recently relocated from Brooklyn, New York, to Southern California, where she currently lives and works in Los Angeles with her husband, two daughters, and their beloved Goldendoodle.