Among many public art projects, she is the artist behind the landmark mural on an MIT building at the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and Main Street in Cambridge, MA. Her artwork can also be found in the collections of the MFA Boston, Harvard Art Museums, Davis Museum, Worcester Art Museum, Google, Facebook, and Fidelity.
Recent exhibitions include the Foster Prize show at ICA Boston (2025-2026), solo show Forms and Foundations, Aicon Gallery, New York (2025), solo show Ritual and Devotion, Cantor Arts Gallery, College of the Holy Cross (2024), and participation in the group exhibitions Deities of Nepal II, Nepal Arts Council (2024) and Reimagine: Himalayan Art Now, The Rubin Museum (2024), Wrightwood659 in Chicago (2024).
Sneha was recently selected for a Studio Residency at the Boston Center for the Arts funded by the Wagner Foundation. Her additional honors include a grant from Collective Futures Fund funded by the Andy Warhol Foundation (2024); Artist of the Year Award by Center for Arts at the Armory (2023); inclusion in WBUR The ARTery’s 25 Millennials of Color (2019); recognition as one of the 100 most influential women in Nepal by the Nepal Cultural Council (2018); a Boston Artist-in-Residence Award (2018); the HUBWeek Change Maker Award (2018); South Asia and the Arts Fund Grant, Harvard University (2017); and Project Zero Artist-in-Residence Award, Harvard University (2017).
Sneha holds a Master’s degree from Harvard University and is a dedicated advocate for the arts. As the Arts Program Manager at Harvard’s Mittal South Asia Institute, she works to amplify Asian art and culture.
At the heart of Sneha’s work is a commitment to community and cultural pride. Whether through her paintings, murals, or sculptures, she creates spaces sharing tradition and stories.
Photo by Mel Taing
Sneha Shrestha, known artistically as IMAGINE, is a Nepali artist whose practice bridges her native Devanagari script with the visual language of graffiti handstyles. Her work advocates for the preservation of living cultures within contemporary art, insisting that language, ritual, and memory remain active and not just archival. Working across painting, murals and sculpture, Shrestha moves between meditative abstraction and large-scale public intervention.
Sneha’s work balances cultural and political concerns with a deep commitment to material and story telling. In some bodies of work, she foregrounds calligraphic repetition drawn from Sanskrit scriptures and immigration documents, transforming language into meditative fields of color and gesture. In others, she shifts toward architectural scale and sculptural presence, exploring guardianship, migration, and belonging through brass, steel, and site-responsive installation. Across mediums, her central themes include cultural continuity, diaspora identity, and the creation of spaces that foster reflection, protection, and pride.
Sneha’s sculpture,Dwarpalika, was recently acquired by the Harvard Art Museums and is currently on long term view on the second floor. Sneha is the first contemporary Nepali artist to be included in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston’s Permanent Collection with her painting Home416. She has been awarded the esteemed James and Audrey Foster Prize by the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Boston. Her new public art sculpture “About a Living Culture” in Queens, New York was included in Our Culture magazine’s 5 Innovative Examples of Public Art. Her monumental sculpture, Calling the Earth to Witness, was commissioned by the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, adding another milestone to her evolving practice.
