Sonali Pattnaik

I am an award-winning feminist poet, artist, academician and educator. I am largely self-taught in art, barring my elective studio art classes in school which opened me up to some new possibilities and sharpened older ones. I have been playing with lines and colours since as long as I can remember. My art, unlike my academic writing and research, is largely pleasure-driven, visceral and an uncharted process of play which is guided by a non-conscious self and imagination, partly fuelled by my age-old relationship with literature and my quest for experiencing my emotions or being with my 'self'. I never decide what I want to create- I let the medium, mood and texture of the given situation shape my work, suspending conscious and structured thought for the time. While that is the process and style of creation, given that my creative and critical interests centre on questions of the body, identity and the politics of the visual embedded in gender theory, feminism, post-colonialism and cinema studies, my art work quite naturally, overlaps with much of what I read, write and think through but in an unmapped manner and it is difficult and undesirable to wonder which informs which- only that they intertwine in exciting ways that propel and...

PhD in English from Mumbai University, India
MPhil in English from Delhi University
MA in English from St. Stephen's College, India
BA in English from Lady Shri Ram College, India