Jyoti Desai is a visual artist based in Stamford, Connecticut. She holds an MFA in Advertising Art from the University of North Texas, where she also taught undergraduate courses in graphic design and drawing, and managed both the university’s graphic studio and its campus gallery. These early roles in teaching, design, and curatorial work laid the foundation for a dynamic creative career that has spanned over two decades.
For more than 25 years, Desai worked as a designer and creative director across a wide range of industries, leading in-house creative, digital, and marketing teams for Fortune 100 companies. In 2015, she founded GreatOwl Creative, a consultancy through which she continues to provide strategic design and branding services.
In recent years, Desai has returned to painting, embracing a more intuitive and organic creative process. Her abstract works are characterized by bold, high-contrast compositions; powerfully evocative color inspired by her Indian heritage and textiles; and richly layered surfaces. Through a method of building up and peeling away paint and texture, she creates visual depth that reveals the history of the painting’s making. Each piece invites viewers to bring their own interpretation, allowing the work to evolve in meaning through shared experience.
Desai’s parallel passion for ballroom dancing deeply informs her art-making process. Just as dance requires rhythm, balance, and responsiveness to a partner, her painting practice thrives on movement, improvisation, and an embodied sense of flow. The sweeping gestures of her brushwork echo the turns and pivots of dance, while her sensitivity to timing and pause mirrors the choreography of layered paint. This fusion of disciplines lends her canvases a sense of motion and vitality, as if the energy of the dance floor has been translated into visual form.
She works from her home studio, where she continues to explore the expressive possibilities of paint, texture, and form, and is an active member of the Contemporary Art Network, exhibiting her work in curated shows in New York City and the surrounding area.
Recent Exhibitions
Black, White, and shades of Gray juried show – Stamford Art Association (SAA), 2025
Portraits of our Planet juried show – SAA, 2025
Beautifull Margins – The Painting Center, NYC, 2025
Beautifall Moments juried show – winner 2nd place – SAA, 2024
Burton Young, Greenwich CT – solo show, 2023
Faber Birren National Color Show – juried show, 2023
First Street Gallery – Contemporary Art Network, 2022
Bendheim Gallery, Greenwich CT – member show, 2021
Bendheim Gallery, Greenwich CT – juried Show, 2019
Bendheim Gallery, Greenwich CT – member show, 2018