Dr. Vasundhara “Vasu” Tolia is a Michigan-based physician-artist, contemporary mixed media painter, speaker, and author whose work explores healing, identity, resilience, cultural memory, and the emotional power of color.
After a distinguished career as a pediatric gastroenterologist, professor, researcher, and division director, Dr. Tolia turned to painting as a new language of connection and renewal. Her studio practice brings together layered acrylics, collage, texture, mark-making, and intuitive abstraction to create work that is vibrant, emotionally expressive, and deeply rooted in lived experience.
Informed by her medical background, Indian heritage, and ongoing interest in the relationship between art, well-being, and human transformation, Dr. Tolia’s work moves between abstraction and figuration. Her paintings often explore women’s inner lives, neurodivergence, mental health, spiritual memory, and the ways visual environments can support reflection, presence, and reconnection.
Her artwork has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions and placed in medical, corporate, institutional, and private collections. Her work has also received national recognition, including selection by The Washington Post among the top COVID-related artworks in the country and publication on the cover of the CDC journal Emerging Infectious Diseases.
As a speaker and physician-artist, Dr. Tolia extends her creative practice beyond the studio, speaking about art as a language of healing, identity, and reconnection. Through her paintings, public speaking, writing, and community engagement, she invites viewers to consider how color, texture, and creative expression can open new pathways toward wholeness.
A portion of her art sales supports charitable organizations chosen by her collectors.
