Seela Misra is a self-taught painter based in Austin, Texas. Working primarily in acrylic, she creates intimate portraits of South Asian women in quiet, unguarded moments—figures who often resemble herself or her family. Dressed in loose, menswear-inspired clothing, her subjects are captured in states of stillness, emotional weight, or quiet collapse. These garments are not incidental: for Misra, the space between body and fabric is deeply personal—a place of breath, refuge, and containment. It’s within that space that her own grief lives, alongside a lifelong need for comfort and control.

Her work centers on the subtle ways that sadness, grief, and internal struggle manifest in everyday life—how they are carried quietly, and how, especially for women of color, they are often misunderstood or misread as coldness, anger, or detachment. Painting is, for Misra, an intuitive process and a form of spiritual listening. In moments of sorrow or emotional constriction, she looks for the quiet presence of God—not as a force that erases pain, but as one that draws close and remains.

Her paintings are meditations on what it means to be seen without performance—to be witnessed in pain without needing to justify or soften it. With restraint and reverence, her work holds space for stillness, sadness, and the sacred to exist side by side.