Kirthana Selvaraj

Kirthana Selvaraj is a contemporary painter of Tamil ancestry, born in Auckland and based on Gadigal and Wangal land (Sydney). Her practice spans painting, writing, and research and moves from tender figurative explorations of domestic life, queerness, and cultural inheritance toward a language grounded in uncertainty: figures that resist arrival, surfaces built up and scraped back, bodies that refuse to fully declare themselves. Her work draws on South Asian aesthetics, decolonial thought, and an ongoing engagement with embodied memory and the politics of the body.

Selvaraj is a two-time Archibald Prize finalist and the inaugural recipient of the 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art Andy Ewing Fellowship. In 2023, she was selected to complete a major public commission for Venues NSW. Her work has been exhibited at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, S.H. Ervin Gallery, and the Art Gallery of Western Australia, among other institutional and commercial spaces.

Her writing appears in The Journal of Creative Arts Therapies and the forthcoming Materials and Media in Art Therapy (Routledge, 2025). Selvaraj is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney and a Lecturer at Western Sydney University, where she teaches across Sociology, Ethics, Research, and Arts Therapy , disciplines that sustain and sharpen her critical engagement with art-making.

@kirthana.selvaraj
https://www.kirthanaselvaraj.com/artwork