Seema Kohli (b. 1960) is a multi-disciplinary artist working through the imagination of mythical and fantastical worlds from an eco feminist eye. Engaging with visual and performative mediums, Kohli explores the themes of beauty and sensuality echoed in philosophy and spirituality studies across civilization. Her work primarily celebrates the cosmic feminine and its relationship to forces of creation and destruction. There is a focused engagement with the concept of Hiranayagarbha or The Golden Womb; she attempts to create new artistic identities by reshaping belongings, bringing the past and the present into a dialogue through a process of decay, hybridisation and transformation.

For Kohli, an experimental artist, poetry is a recorded conversation between her, the canvas, and the rendered image. Where they are all living conscious beings worthy of responding with emotions and sensitivity. Though she has been performing her poetry as narratives, in 2013, she self-published a compilation of verses, I Am, which was performed at TEDx, Chennai. On the second book, Experiencing the Goddesses, she is a co-author and editor. She is already working on co-authoring the third book, which is a compilation of her own poetry written in the past 17 years.

As a multi-disciplinary artist, Kohli transforms the body into a living vessel and an archive of ancestral memory, devotion, and samskaras. In her performances, myth is brought off the canvas to embody it within real space, allowing the energy of a location to dictate her movements and voice. In her performances, such as In Silence the Secrets Speak or The Fourth Moon, she eschews rigid choreography for a spontaneous flow of verse and gesture, transforming physical flesh into memory. By activating space through this live presence, she weaves narratives where her poetry becomes a tangible, present force.

Spanning over five decades of experiments in form and language, Kohli’s works live in multiple museums and institutional collections all over the world, including the British Museum (UK), MAP, Bangalore, India, Kiran Nadar Museum of Arts (India), Partition Museum, Birth Rites Collection (UK), Rubin Museum (USA, Phoenix Museum of Art (Arizona, USA) Bihar Museum(Patna), Bharat Bhavan, Lalit Kala Akademie (India) NGMA(Bangalore) to name a few.

Kohli’s several large-scale murals, are acquired by Supreme Court (New Delhi), Sardar Patel Bhawan (Patna, Bihar), Delhi and Mumbai International Airports, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Goldman Sech, Morgan Stanley and many more. Her works have also been shown at collateral events such as the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2016), Venice Biennale of Art/Architecture (2015, 2016), ARCO (Madrid,2008), Art Basel, and at the India Art Fair (2010-2024), Asia Society HK, among many others. Kohli has also been an invited speaker at several conferences and institutions, including TEDx (2012), WIN Conference (2013-2015), NGMA (Bangalore, 2010, 2014, 2016), Harvard University, University of California at Davis, University of Chicago, University of Connecticut and the University of Buffalo to name a few.

Kohli lives and works in New Delhi, India.