Srijana Giri is a watercolour, acrylic, and mixed-media artist based in Thimphu, Bhutan. Her work moves between painting, illustration, and installation, often drawn from the people and traditions around her — portraits, Himalayan folklore, and family memory alongside satirical illustration and print. Alongside her studio practice, she works in operations and social innovation, and is the creator of The Bhutanese Dream card game and the Dzongkha Colouring Book.
Art is how I stay in conversation with myself. I am a Nepali woman raised in Bhutan, and most days that still feels like holding two threads that were never quite spun into one — so I paint, sketch, and build things by hand as a way of sitting with that instead of resolving it too quickly. It is less a career than a daily practice, closer to meditation than performance: a sketchbook page before the workday starts, a canvas returned to over months, a language relearned one hand-painted letter at a time. I don't think of my work as arriving at answers. I think of it as staying curious about my own identity, my own inheritance, my own community, for as long as it takes — learning and growing a little with every piece, the same way a p