Manu Saluja makes paintings of women in her life, placing them in ethereal, pattern-filled interiors based on her memories.  Combining chromatic, thin layers of oil paint with thicker, raw passages, Saluja leaves certain thin areas exposed, while building up smoother, scumbled, modeled forms, creating striking illusions of translucent skin and atmospheric realism. Her work explores human vulnerability within the complexities of family life, cultural identity, social perception, and femininity.  Her New York City subway paintings extend that same inquiry into the environment itself: rusted girders, crumbling stone walls and chipped, stained tile are rendered as large-scale, trompe l’oeil abstractions, where decay becomes color, texture, and unexpected beauty.

Saluja's paintings have been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, the Reading Public Museum in Pennsylvania, and the Wausau Museum of Contemporary Art in Wisconsin. She won the 2019 BP Portrait Travel Award; the resulting body of work was exhibited at the Aberdeen Art Gallery in Scotland in 2020. In 2023, Saluja was unanimously selected by the Worcester County Mechanics Association to paint a full-length portrait of Sojourner Truth, unveiled in 2024 and now permanently installed in the Grand Portrait Gallery.

Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions and is held in public and private collections across the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and India. She has been featured in American Art Collector, Fine Art Connoisseur, Artists & Illustrators, the Huffington Post, and Fast Company Design.

Saluja holds a B.A. in Psychology from Barnard College and a BFA (1997) from the School of Visual Arts, where she also studied privately with John Frederick Murray. She received her MFA from the New York Academy of Art in 2013, where she now serves as Adjunct Professor; she has also taught at SUNY Fashion Institute of Technology and Montclair State University.

Born in Brooklyn in 1971 and a longtime resident of Queens, Saluja lives and works in Long Island, NY.

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