Sheelasha Rajbhandari is an artist and curator based out of Kathmandu. Her works draw upon an embodied and speculative lineage of femininities to question the positioning of women and fluid beings across time, landscapes, and cosmologies. Her practice is a provocation to reflect beyond neo-liberal conception of time in order to decenter patriarchal structures that perpetuate cycles of industrial extraction and individual exhaustion. For her, art-making is about making space for collective action. This questioning feeds into her recent artistic and curatorial approach that recompose notions of Indigeneity, gender, sexuality, worth, and productivity.
Rajbhandari is co-curator for the Tamba project at 11th Asia Pacific Triennial 2024. She is one of the curators for 17th Biennale Jogja 2023 and Colomboscope 2024. She co-curated the Kathmandu Triennale 2077, Nepal Pavilion at Venice Biennale (2022), ‘Garden of Ten Seasons’ at Savvy Contemporary, Berlin (2022) and ’12 Baishakh,’ Bhaktapur (2015) alongside Hit Man Gurung. Her textile installation was exhibited at Kunstinstituut Melly (2023), Museum of Art and Design; NewYork (2022), Footscray Art Center; Melbourne ( 2022). Her installation in the traveling exhibition “A beast, a god and a line” (2018-2020) was presented at Para Site, Hong Kong; TS1, Yangon; Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; Kunsthall, Trondheim; and MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum, Chiang Mai. She has also been an artist in residence at the Bellas Artes Projects (2019) and Para Site (2017). As a part of her collective, she has been a part of Dhaka Art Summit (2020) and Biennale of Sydney (2020). Rajbhandari crafted the Dankini initiative, which prioritizes rest and sensory pleasure while delving into the complexity of identity and structural forces. She is also the co-founder of ArtTree Nepal, an artist collective and Kalā Kulo, an arts initiative.
Most recently, her work was included in New Photography 2025: Lines of Belonging at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York (September 14, 2025 – January 17, 2026), further affirming her growing international recognition.