Priya N. Green (b. 1986, New Jersey) is a Connecticut-based artist whose layered oil paintings inhabit the space between memory, imagination, and place. Drawing from her Indian heritage and her grandfather’s legacy as a Bollywood filmmaker, Green transforms fragments of remembered images into luminous, dream-like compositions.

Green received a BFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University and an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Green has shown her work internationally at many institutions including the Jersey City Museum, University Museum of Contemporary Art, Zimmerli Art Museum, and the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. In 2023, Green had her first museum solo exhibition at the D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts at the Springfield Museums in Springfield, MA. She has been recognized with numerous awards including the international Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant and a fellowship from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In 2023, Green’s work was featured in John Seed’s book More Disruption: Representation in Flux, a poignant survey of forty-three internationally acclaimed painters whose works address issues of realism within contemporary painting. Green’s work is collected both privately and in public institutions such as the Springfield Museums, University Museum of Contemporary Art at UMass Amherst, Forbes Library, Western New England University and New England Public Media.

Green is an Assistant Professor in Painting & Foundations at Central Connecticut State University. Green lives and works in Connecticut with her husband, artist Andrae Green, and their three children.

Artist Statement

“I create highly saturated oil paintings that recall childhood trips visiting family in India. My work draws from the life of my late grandfather (ajju), a storyteller and 1980s Bollywood filmmaker. These paintings bridge gaps across generations, distance, and time, capturing atmospheric, dream-like scenes that reflect my upbringing as a millennial between two worlds. As my children grow older, I seek to preserve my ajju’s storytelling legacy.

Each of these paintings carries the heightened sensory experience of being in India, while alluding to the familiar New England landscape that surrounds me. The intense smells and sounds; the thick, hazy air. This became the backdrop to understanding my family on the other side of the world. Through color, texture, and transparency, I paint an atmosphere that is suspended somewhere between figment and reality; like grasping a fleeting dream before waking.” -Priya N. Green