Divya Balivada is an Indian artist based in Goa and London. She recently graduated with MA Painting from the Royal College of Art, where she was shortlisted for the Jaguar x RCA Prize 2025. She has exhibited internationally and received the Women’s Achiever Art Award 2024 in Goa, India. Divya was a trained dentist before she became a painter.

She navigates painting as a necessity, an instinctive way of being in this world. Having lived through PTSD, gender biases, displacement, and generational trauma, she finds painting vast and fluid enough to hold the intensity of being human. Recursive and dynamic gestures are bodily accumulations that hover between compulsive and meditative, becoming records of endurance, healing, and reclamation.