About the Artist
Kuzana was born in Bombay in 1971. Her parents brought her home from the hospital on the back of their motorcycle, and she was a newborn mango nesting in her mother’s arms. On that ride, Kuzana first saw how the hurtling landscapes were marked by lines where fruit and glass, fabric and edifice meet. She strewed the highway behind them with vibrant origami as she dreamed.
The first years of her life were divided between the ancestral home of her grandfather, surrounded by lush gardens and groves of coconut trees, and her grandmother’s exquisite Worli sea face residence. Kuzana’s earliest memories are of temperate weather, fragrant jasmine blossoms, and cascading layers of color.
In time, Kuzana and her infant sister joined their newly immigrated parents in England. The setting changed from streets crammed with disorderly traffic and cows to cars neatly parked in rows, but Kuzana preferred the crumbling palatial structures that still lived in her mind to these frilly curtains and tidy brick homes. The new plastic toys at her feet became the rude complement of those of tin and copper that lay beside them.
Her tiffin tucked in her luggage, Kuzana shuttled in train cars to boarding schools in Cornwall, Surrey, and Kodaikanal. At the age of 10, she and her family relocated to New York, and the American metropolis took shape in those eyes where the Deccan plateau once stood.
It was as an art student at SUNY Purchase that Kuzana met her husband and began the work in love and paint of revisiting the garden of her childhood. They married after their graduation in 1995, and moved to South Korea, spending the next six years teaching English in historic Kyung Ju. Returning to the United States in 2001, they lived first in New Mexico, migrated to California's Central Valley ten years later, and then returned to Santa Fe, New Mexico in 2017.
In 2021, Kuzana completed a 4 year residency at El Zaguan on Canyon Road, and moved to Los Alamos. She has participated in six other residencies: in Minnesota, Sri Lanka, China, Scotland Latvia and Iceland. Her paintings have been included on the sets of both television shows and feature films—the most recent of which were Where’d You Go Bernadette, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, Southpaw and My All-America. Kuzana's first solo museum exhibition was Oil at the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art in 2014. A second solo followed shortly thereafter, Rev Zero at the Bakersfield Museum of Art in 2015. Kuzana's work has been exhibited, published, and collected both privately and publicly, nationally and internationally.
