Roma Devanbu BIO

Roma Devanbu

BIO

All Images and Text © Roma Devanbu, 2014

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Roma Devanbu was born in Boston, Massachusetts and spent her childhood in Montclair, New Jersey, making things and climbing trees.

Her under-graduate art education, at Carnegie-Mellon University, had its roots deep in the western traditions of Europe and America, lots of figure study, renaissance perspective, Greek ideals of proportion, as well as 19th and 20th century movements and masters. By the time she was in her early twenties she was hungry for more. Devanbu has studied and traveled extensively, mostly through Asia, in search of other ways of seeing and making art. She spent a year studying art and Asian art history in the graduate program at the M. S. University of Baroda in India, here her visual vocabulary undulated and swelled. In Devanbu’s graduate work, at Pratt Institute in NYC, she studied with the abstract expressionist Phoebe Helman, the street photographer Philip Perkis and the historian/gallery director, Alan Klotz.

Devanbu’s current work is about spiritual life. It is about devotional feelings, doubts, longings, and prayers. It is about the belief structures and rituals of thought that we build up around our concept of the divine. And it is about the shape of the spaces we create for the divine to fill.

Devanbu has over 20 years of teaching experience, 13 on the college level, including 8 years at Bergen Community College in Paramus, New Jersey, where she was a tenured professor until moving to California in 1997, and 5 years at The Art Institute of California in Sacramento.

Devanbu is represented by Axis Gallery and is a Studio Residency Artist at Verge Center for the Arts, both in Sacramento, California.

Roma Devanbu lives in Davis, California with her husband, Premkumar Devanbu, who teaches Computer Science at U. C. Davis.