Kyla Gaganam

Kyla Gaganam, also known by her art stage name ZOOGIRL, is a multidisciplinary artist and curator based in Austin, Texas. Through intricate hand-drawn works
rooted in Dravidian heritage, mythology, and the natural world, she weaves layered narratives about the lived experiences of South Asian women, part myth, part fantasy, structured like puzzles for the viewer to slowly decipher. She creates worlds where ancestral symbols, climate grief, and bold femininity collide. Each piece inspired from careful research across diaspora’s from dravidian texts and literature Gaganam grew up with.

Gaganam’s practice is informed by her background in zoology and sustainability, both of which shape how she understands her relationship to the natural world. In traditional South Asian art, women and nature have always been inseparable, and her work carries that lineage forward. Through ecofeminist and Indofuturist frameworks, she builds worlds and tells stories from a decolonized perspective, exploring climate change and ancestral history as interconnected forces rather than separate contexts.

Deeply inspired by comic art and sequential storytelling, Gaganam approaches each collection as a continuation of a larger universe. Every series builds on the last, expanding the world of ZOOGIRL through mythology, heavily inspired by her culture’s storytelling practices. Her figures are not isolated subjects but inhabitants of an evolving story, one that grows richer and more complex with each body of work.

She works in chai (tea) staining, heavily inspired by Kalamkari and Kalighat drawing traditions, blending them with contemporary materials including markers,
pens, and ink. This bridges ancestral art forms with the realities of modern life. Colonization erased the diversity of South Asian people from their cultural stories and art over time. Gaganam’s figures are dark, complex, and unapologetic, centering the full spectrum of South Asian womanhood without compromise, addressing colorism and colonialism in every body of work. .

In 2025, she curated Untitled Homeland, the first South Asian art exhibition in Texas at the Museum of Asian Texans, and Rituals, the first South Asian cultural exhibition in Austin, featured in the Austin Statesman. She serves as Program Director and Curator for OFCOLOR and holds a Master of Liberal Arts in Sustainability from Harvard University.

ARTIST STATEMENT

“I begin every piece by staining my paper with chai. Tea is embedded in South Asian domestic life, and every time I spilled a cup of chai on paper I was fascinated by the textures and colors. I found it to be a resemblance of my own skin tone and found it beautiful to be the same color as my favorite drink. It made me feel represented in a way I hadn’t understood at the time, and I use it as the base for all of my pieces because it provides a hue that humanizes my drawings and brings more realism to my portraits of brown skin women.

My background is in zoology and sustainability, and both heavily influence the ecofeminist themes of my work. I spent years studying and working with wildlife,
and what I took from that is something traditional South Asian art already knew: the feminine and the natural world are not separate. Ecofeminism is the lens I was
already looking through before I had a word for it, inspired by the many women I worked with in those spaces. Climate grief and feminism are deeply interconnected, and I wanted to create pieces that felt like I was reclaiming those narratives.

I am deeply inspired by comic art and sequential storytelling. Each collection is a continuation of a larger universe, and my figures are characters within it. The
world of ZOOGIRL grows with every series. I draw from Kalamkari, Kalighat, and chai staining traditions, reframed through contemporary storytelling using the materials I found the most joy in as a child: markers, pens, everyday tools I can find anywhere. Some pieces take up to a year to complete because of the detail and intricacy which is used to frame a larger story, each work functioning like an i-spy page, meant to be read slowly.

My pieces explore colorism, class, and the reclamation of patriarchal colonialism in South Asian stories and myths. Colonization did not just erase our stories, it erased who we were allowed to be inside them, and allowed people to retell stories they never understood. The women I draw are dark, divine, and grounded in real texts I often address in the work itself.”