Aruna Balasubramanian

 Aruna Balasubramanian is an oil painter from Philadelphia, PA. She is currently a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford in England, where she is pursuing an MPhil degree in Social Anthropology. In 2026 Aruna graduated from Yale University, where she worked for four years at the Yale Center for British Art and earned high honors in her Anthropology and History majors. In her spare time she visits museums and galleries, reads novels, and speaks in French and Japanese. 

 

Aruna sees her artistic process as a form of meditation: by using paint to reimagine scenes that she has visited, she considers her place in the world. Her approach to painting landscapes, cityscapes, domestic interiors, and built environments draws inspiration from American modernist artists ranging from Georgia O'Keeffe to Wayne Thiebaud.