About Me
I’m Punam — artist, storyteller, mother, space-holder.
A daughter of migration, healing, and resilience.
I walk the path of transformation through watercolor, conversation, and remembering.
My journey is woven with the threads of ancestry—honoring the richness of my own cultural roots and the many communities whose stories have long been silenced or overlooked.
Each brushstroke, each offering, is a way home. A way to reconnect with what has always lived within us.
I don’t see art as a product. I see it as practice.
As ceremony. As breath.
A way to turn grief into beauty, and struggle into something sacred.
A way to make meaning from the pieces we’ve carried, inherited, and are still learning to release.
Roots & Migration
I come from islands where the ocean sings the language of my ancestors.
From lands where migration shaped the lines of my palms.
Born in Fiji and carried across continents at thirteen, I learned early that home isn’t always a place.
Sometimes, it’s a feeling. A knowing. A rhythm inside your own body.
Sometimes, it’s something you create with your own two hands.
Art became my first language of healing.
In a world that didn’t always see me, it gave me a way to see myself—
To stitch together memory, hope, wonder, and longing.
To hold both the ache and the possibility.
Resilience & Rebuilding
Life brought me into entrepreneurship, then into the work of community and service—supporting nonprofits across Western North Carolina.
I’ve witnessed how systems can both uplift and harm.
And I’ve lived the quiet rebuilding—leaving an abusive marriage, starting over as a single mother, healing generational wounds while holding the hands of my own child.
Watercolor, once just a private refuge, became a bridge:
Between past and future
Between self and community
Between survival and liberation
The Work I Do Today
Today, I am an artist, a transformative coach, and a counseling graduate student.
I’m building a life rooted in cultural humility, ancestral wisdom, and radical imagination.
Through Shakti Shanti Studio, I offer spaces where creativity becomes a way of coming home—
Not to who we were told to be, but to who we already are.
In every workshop, every painting, and every conversation, I hold this truth close:
Healing is our birthright.
Creativity is ancestral memory.
Liberation is something we do together.
Welcome.
You belong here.
Your story belongs here.
Your heart belongs here.
