Syāmarāṇī Dāsī

Syāmarāṇī Dāsī was born in New York City and met Śrīla Prabhupāda in Tompkins Square Park in 1966, when she was nineteen. She became one of his first disciples, and he asked her to paint. She has been painting ever since.

From 1969 to 1982 she was principal artist for the Bhaktivedānta Book Trust, and her paintings illustrate the Bhagavad-gītā As It Is, the Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam and the Caitanya-caritāmṛta — books that have since appeared in more than eighty languages and over five hundred and fifty million copies. For a great many readers her images are the first sight they have of the tradition's stories.

From 1992 she studied under Śrīla Bhaktivedānta Nārāyaṇa Gosvāmī Mahārāja, and it was he who gave her the name Syāmarāṇī; her earlier work is signed Jaduranī Dāsī. She served as principal artist and senior editor for Gauḍīya Vedānta Publications from 1997 to 2010, and travelled the world some twenty-five times in service of his mission.

In 2021 she founded Sacred Vedic Arts in Miami — a Bhakti-yoga temple, cultural centre and art gallery in one — where she teaches the iconography she has spent her life painting. Behind it lie more than three hundred paintings and fifty-seven years of sevā.