Maithili Chaturvedi

Maithili Chaturvedi (b. 2003, Mumbai, India) is a painter whose practice engages with her cherished worship of the Woman on screen. She re-authors time-honoured heroines of Hindi-language cinema into intimate pseudo-self-portraits, investigating the politics of desire, self-mythology, and the feminine gaze within Indian society with both reverence and resistance.

In her work, glamour and decoration are revealed as sites of structural and emotional power rather than excess, and frivolity becomes a serious, devotional practice. Drawing from her archetype of the Dream Girl, Chaturvedi explores the dialectic between image and lived experience, asking how beauty functions as both aspiration and control, liberation and performance. Using velvet for its simultaneous associations with kitsch and luxury, she creates sensorial tensions of colour and light that render the cinematic Woman both luminous and untouchable.

Chaturvedi received her BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 2025 and was the recipient of the Florence Leif Award. She will receive her MFA in Visual Arts with a concentration in Painting from Columbia University (2028). She exhibited her debut solo presentation Dream Girl at Gallery Maxima, Mumbai in July 2026. Recent exhibitions include Shape of Attention at Aicon Gallery, New York (2026); Welcome To My Den at Unveil Gallery, Orange County (2025); and As She Should at Selva, New York (2025), amongst others.