Uma is an artist and an engineer who has called the Bay Area her home since 1999. Specializing in watercolor painting and urban sketching, she also works with ink, gouache, and digital mediums. With numerous awards and over 35 global exhibitions, she has taught at Urban Sketchers International Symposia for years and authored The Urban Sketching Handbook: Drawing with a Tablet, focusing on digital art. She strongly believes in cross-pollination and borrowing ideas from various fields to enhance her art..
She has led more than 45 workshops, 25 lectures, and demos worldwide, and holds signature memberships with CWA, NWS, and CSPWC. As a community builder, Uma is active in local and international watercolor societies and serves as the Strategy Lead for Urban Sketchers' Executive Board. When not creating art, Uma is the Founder-CEO of Vivify.ai, an AI startup that empowers creativity without replacing human input. Previously, she spent 20 years in semiconductor design, focusing on high-speed communication chips, and holds a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and a Bachelor of Engineering from Pune University, India.
Art serves as an escape for Uma when life becomes overwhelming. She channels the beauty around her into her paintings, like her piece Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which captured a fleeting moment in Manchester as warm morning light transitioned into cool. Through years of practice, she has learned to pause and absorb beauty when it strikes, turning those moments into stories on paper. Her painting style is dictated by her vision of a scene—soft strokes for clouds, jagged ones for fading skylines. Whether working from photos or painting on location, each method hones different skills. Plein-air painting forces quick decisions, with the environment providing challenges like pests and wind. In contrast, studio work allows for more compositional freedom but lacks the spontaneity and performance aspect of painting in front of an audience.
For Uma, painting is both inspiration and mindset. She expresses herself on paper—whether angry, playful, or curious—and hopes viewers sense her mastery of the tools, finding simplicity in her command of the medium. She also invites them to interpret a story from the scene, making her paintings interactive. Each of her works presents a challenge, like mastering greens in a landscape or finding joy in painting a mall. She thrives on overcoming obstacles, and this pursuit brings her joy, satisfaction, and a sense of community. Uma encourages others to take up the brush, inviting them into the shared experience and connection that art creates.