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 are exhibited nationally & internationally and can be seen in collections at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, Crocker art Museum, University of Michigan Museum of Art, Newport Art Museum (USA); Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (India); Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park (Japan); FuLe International Ceramic Art Museum (China); and in many private collections. Her work has been widely reviewed and featured in Hyperallergic, BOMB Magazine, Dovetail Mag, Art and Cake, Los Angeles Review of Books, Bay Nature, PinUp Magazine, New City Mag, American Craft Council, Alta Journal, Brooklyn Rail, Lana Turner: a Journal of Poetry and Opinion, and Riot Material. 

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