After thirty-five years in Southern India, transdisciplinary artist Ashwini Bhat now lives and works in the foothills of Sonoma Mountain, California. Coming from a background in literature and classical Indian dance, Bhat creates installations using bronze and ceramic sculptures, video, and text, to develop a unique visual language exploring the intersections between body and nature, self and other. Her work — with its ecofeminist undertones — shows the influence of syncretic shrines, rituals, and non-Western metaphysical concepts of empathy for the more-than-human. Bhat sees her work as an act of (re)mapping consciousness, contributing to a spiritual or psychological archive, with an emphasis on the transformative aspects of place. 

Bhat is a 2024 John S. Knudsen Prize winner from the Crocker Art Museum and a 2023 United States Artists fellow. She has also received the Howard Foundation Award for Sculpture and the McKnight Foundation Residency Fellowship. Her sculptures can be seen in museums in the USA, India, Japan, China, and in many private collections. Her work has been widely reviewed and featured in Hyperallergic, Los Angeles Review of Books, Bay Nature, New City Mag, American Craft Council, Brooklyn Rail, and many other notable publications. 

Bhat is a certified naturalist at the Osborne Preserve, a research site for Sonoma State University’s Center for Environmental Inquiry. In 2025, the first early mid-career survey of Bhat’s work, “Ashwini Bhat: Reverberating Self” was exhibited. Her artist monograph is forthcoming with Radius Books in 2026. She is represented by Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Los Angeles, USA, and Project 88, Mumbai, India.