Divya Balivada (Goa, India) is an Indian artist based between Goa and London. A recent graduate of the Royal College of Art, where she completed her MA in Painting, she was shortlisted for the Jaguar x RCA Prize 2025 and has exhibited internationally, including receiving the Women’s Achiever Art Award 2024 in Goa. Formerly trained as a dentist, Balivada approaches painting as a necessity—an instinctive mode of survival and presence. Informed by lived experiences of PTSD, gender bias, displacement, and generational trauma, her work embraces painting as a vast, fluid space capable of holding human intensity. Through recursive, bodily gestures that oscillate between compulsion and meditation, her paintings become accumulative records of endurance, healing, and reclamation.