Aditya Chintapalli is a figurative oil painter, filmmaker, and engineer born in South India, who moved to New York at eleven and has since lived and worked between New York, Paris, and Hyderabad. He began painting in 2017, working large — figurative oils on linen, six feet and bigger — before developing his current practice on hand-prepared wood and copper, with drawings in sumi ink, silverpoint, and charcoal.
His ongoing series, Tides of Transformation, places sleeping figures in tranquil water surrounded by vast chrysanthemum blooms, attended by swans and peacocks who lean toward them like gentle heralds. A parallel mythology series brings figures from Indian sacred narratives — Vishnu, Arjuna, Nandi, Garuda — into the same dreamlike visual language. In November 2025, a large Nandi sculpture with oil paintings across its surface was exhibited at the Architectural Digest Design Show, Mumbai.
He studied filmmaking at EICAR, Paris, where he directed the short film Kimono — winner of Best Director and Best Film at multiple international festivals — and a documentary on French painter Valérie Dintrich-Bouisson. He subsequently served as Assistant Director on SS Rajamouli’s Varanasi (RRR, Baahubali), acting as a direct link between the director and the production design team because of his visual background. He holds an M.S. and B.S. in Electrical Engineering from NYU (Magna Cum Laude) and has been featured in Hyperrealism Magazine #13.
His work is driven by a single question: what does it take to make a person truly stop, and see the world that is right beside them?
