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.

  • Location

    Berkeley, California, United States

  • Area of expertise

    Painting, sculpture, calligraphy, poetry, performance, abstraction, spirituality, identity, resilience and interconnectedness

  • Achievements

    Across a career spanning more than five decades, Salma Kamlesh Arastu has created over 2,000 paintings, three public art sculptures and seven books of art and poetry. Her work has featured in more than sixty solo exhibitions and over two hundred group exhibitions worldwide.