Uma Bardhan (born 1945) is an Indian contemporary painter whose works often focus on stories and figures that are under-represented in both mainstream and contemporary art. Her preferred medium is watercolour on silk, although she has also worked in oil on canvas. Her paintings are held in several major collections in India and abroad.
Born in Kolkata, she studied Arts at the University of Calcutta and then took a diploma in fine arts at the Birla Academy of Art and Culture in West Bengal, where she trained under Makhan Dutta Gupta in oils and Maniklal Banerjee in watercolour. She was drawn to art from childhood, and she often read the poems of Rabindranath Tagore and sketched what she imagined from them. She now lives and works in Gurgaon, Haryana.
Her work brings together nature, Hindu gods and goddesses, women and birds, with a strong spiritual dimension. She held her first solo exhibition in 1987. Her 2014 show Cosmic Dance of Shiva I explored the dancing forms of Shiva, a subject that took her to many Shiva temples across India. In another exhibition she contrasted the artificial environment of urban life with the purity of rural nature, a theme shaped by her years in Kolkata and her travels to villages and tribal areas of Bengal.
She is one of very few artists to use watercolour on silk, a painstaking process in which the silk is mounted on board before painting begins. She has also taken part in group and social-cause exhibitions, including one on women's empowerment in 2012.