Kalila Ain is an artist and illustrator based in Brooklyn, New York. She began her formal education at the High School of Art & Design and Art Students League of New York; studying oil painting and fresco restoration at Istituto Lorenzo de' Medici in Florence, Italy before earning her bachelor's degree in painting and art history from SUNY Purchase in 2020. Kalila’s work is held in the public collections of the Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital in New York City and The Colored Girls Museum of Philadelphia, PA. Kalila Ain has exhibited in group shows at New York University, HAUSEN, Photoville, and Kentucky Center for African American Heritage among others. Her work has been featured in HuffPost, Office Magazine, The New Yorker, and NYU Arts Digest. She is the illustrator of children's book Life is Fine and her painting My Mother Named Me Beloved was selected by New York University’s Center for Black Visual Culture to represent their Black Rest Project Initiative.

My creative practice is informed by an overwhelming desire to see healing in our world. I am curious about the human condition and how a seemingly mundane moment can become a luminous and otherworldly source of epiphanic connection. Themes throughout my work include healing from breaking, birth and creation, union, memory,  spirit and sovereignty. By paying reverence to forces unseen, I invite and empower viewers to recognize the intangible.

Photograph by kya. Garment by Desiree Scarborough.