Hi! My name is Misha Bhatia, and I am multi-media visual artist, writer, dancer, crocheter, and occasional photographer. My favorite part about being an artist is how there is no real time minimum or maximum for creating art. Art can always be added to, made more detailed or intricate, or it can be left with a more abstract, simple beauty.
My artistic background includes professionally training in oil painting for 10 years, training in several styles of dance off-and-on (most notably kathak, hip-hop, contemporary Caribbean, and modern), and earning my BA in Medical Humanities from Barnard College where I explored and expanded my growth as a writer, crafter, photographer, and visual artist. My favorite place on campus was the Design Center, Barnard’s makerspace and art studio, where I created several original art pieces through painting on textiles and created jewelry using wire, chain, gemstones, and beads. As a student, I earned two awards from the SNAP International Photo Contest: 2nd place in the Landscape/Nature – Animals category and 2nd place in the Women in the World category. I also happened upon a Nicholas Cage drawing contest with 100+ entries at Hifi Provisions in Brooklyn, New York, and won first prize. Throughout college, I honed my sketching skills through impromptu sketches of the scenery around me, filling a mini sketchbook with intricate ballpoint sketches from my life in New York City and the Bay Area, and some of my travels around the world. I have also filled a wall of my room with similar impromptu drawings on index cards, making a gallery of both black-and-white and colorful mini artwork using pens and markers. I grew as a writer through taking courses on fiction writing and narrative medicine, and have especially enjoyed writing fictional short stories, free verse poetry, and creative non-fiction.
I love to engage in a plethora of artwork gift-giving to friends and family, making hand-drawn and/or hand-painted greeting cards, crochet clothing and accessories, mixed-media paintings on tote bags, textiles or canvases, and handmade jewelry. Most importantly, I love using art to make people happy, to illicit deep emotions in myself and others, and to understand the complexities of our world.
My experiences across the arts and humanities have helped to hone my personal vision, blending my Indian and American identities, deep love for nature, fascination with the human body and mind, and commitment to helping people from all walks of life. Furthermore, my breadth of experience across the arts, humanities, and sciences has given me a distinct and rich worldview that I use to weave diverse narratives across my art.
As a hopeful future medical doctor, I feel that further exploring and expanding my work in the arts and humanities will continue to enrich my knowledge of the human experience. I see many intersections between art, health, and medicine: the precision and conscious nurturing of talent and skills, the importance of exploring different worldviews, the power of careful observation and listening, and the necessity of narrative in understanding and reasoning with complex, intense, and at times distressing phenomena, to name a few. At their core, both art and medicine are extremely and uniquely human, and lend immense insight into the human condition. I believe that it is vital to incorporate an artistic and humanities lens into medicine. I look forward to continuing to fully immerse myself in and contribute to the arts and humanities during my gap years before medical school, as a doctor, and wherever else life takes me.