Nibha Akireddy is a Bay Area-raised artist and painter. She graduated in 2022 from Stanford University, where she studied Electrical Engineering. Although she hasn’t formally studied art in a university setting, she has been painting her whole life and has always found artistic inspiration in her communities.

“I find artistic inspiration in everyday food, clothes, and music, and I paint to highlight my communities. So much of why and how I make art is because of where I’m from -- from the deeply involved and dramatic high school Bollywood circuit (IYKYK), to my experiences studying neuroscience and engineering”

Nibha’s work centers around the human body and on capturing movement through time in an image. She creates compositions that compress extended emotions and stories and phases of life into two-dimensional figurative works. Pulling from her experiences in classical figurative art and oil painting, but deconstructs it through expressive brushstrokes and moving figures with extra limbs and heads and backgrounds of cluttered objects and memories.

“At its core, my art is inspired by stories, and by embracing specificity -- the way one-of-a-kind stories and experiences can evoke familiarity in so many people.”

She works mostly with oil paints on either raw canvas or wood panels. Most of her works start with reference videos rather than photos, from which Nibha pulls still images that create a cohesive and believable sense of movement when combined together.

“I started my time in San Francisco with the incredible opportunity to show my work in a solo show at /room/. Since then, I’ve been a studio artist at Root Division, and am lucky to be around such an amazing group of artists.”

Nibha has work currently up at The Line Hotel and keep an eye out for her upcoming group show with the Asian American Women Artists’ Association at SOMArts.

Feature Published: March 17, 2023
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