malavika rao

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malavika rao (b. Chennai, India) is a multidisciplinary artist and educator primarily working in painting, fiber, and installation. malavika’s practice recontextualizes practices of homemaking as methods of worldmaking. malavika uses craft to heal generational trauma and tend to the fragile relationship between care and survival. In their installations, malavika employs various crafting practices as modes of speculative world-building—creating spaces to interrogate inherited structures of care. They propose alternative relational frameworks grounded in reciprocity and collective sustenance, invoking a deeper, cosmological sense of interconnectedness, where the act of making becomes a ritual of repair, attunement, and orientation toward life-affirming futures.
malavika received their MFA from California Institute of the Arts, and currently resides in Los Angeles. malavika just returned from a semester-long residency at Colorado College, where served as the Fiber Fellow, teaching and creating a solo exhibition. They have taught in the foundation department at Otis College of Art and Design and workshops at CalArts, Craft Contemporary, Nova Community Arts, and Heavy Manners Library, and they organize and facilitate free education workshops and programs around the city. Their work has been exhibited at Valence Projects, Human Resources Gallery, Venice Art Walk, SOMArts Cultural Center, and Yiwei Gallery, among others.