Salma Kamlesh Arastu
Multidisciplinary visual artist, poet and author
Salma Kamlesh Arastu is a Berkeley-based multidisciplinary visual artist whose practice spans painting, sculpture, calligraphy, poetry and performance. For more than five decades, her work has explored spirituality, identity and interconnectedness through layered abstraction and meditative mark-making.
Born into a Sindhi Hindu family displaced by the Partition of India, and without fingers on her left hand, Arastu turned to art early as a source of resilience, agency and self-definition. These formative experiences continue to inform a practice rooted in endurance, transformation and spiritual inquiry. Her work has been exhibited internationally across Asia, the Middle East, Europe and the United States.