Ritu Raj is a painter and photographer based in Phoenix, Arizona.  He was born in Delhi, India in 1964 to K.B. Goel (1930-2018), a leading art critic specializing in Modern and Contemporary Indian Art, and Premlata Goel, a professor of English Literature. Growing up in a home where art, literature, and philosophy were among the usual topics of conversation, Raj was introduced to the visual arts at an early age. In particular, he was attentive to the interests of his father, who championed abstract painting in India and befriended many of the artists who were members of the Progressive Art Group. Founded in 1947 and active through 1956, the group was considered revolutionary because its members were inspired by recent developments in abstract European and American painting, and favored abstraction because it provided them with a freedom to express themselves in ways that figuration could not. Not surprisingly, Raj made his first paintings while he was still a child, and explored the theater arts when he was a teenager.

In spite of his early fondness for art, Raj studied mathematics, management, and data processing at Delhi University, where he received a Bachelor of Science degree in 1985 and a Post-graduate degree in 1987.  In 1994, he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to work as Vice President for Sales Consulting Services at TMP Worldwide. He became an American citizen in 1999, the year he founded Avasta, one of the pioneering Cloud computing companies.  In 2001, he became a Partner at Accenture, where he developed Oracle’s Western Region High Technology Practice secured a broad client base. In 2004, Raj shifted his focus and founded Wag Hotels, a successful pet-hotel chain that expanded to nine locations. From 2009-2014, he served as CEO for OrchestratorMail, which he co-founded. The company is based on the first-of-its-kind organizational linguistics model for improving business management, email integration, and collaborative workflow. During the same period, the rideshare industry was gaining steam in the Bay Area and, from 2009-2011, Raj oversaw product management for Sidecar, a company that introduced today’s popular transportation system to a new market. Raj’s final position in the corporate world was as Vice President for Corporate Development at Diamond Foundry, where he worked from 2015-2022.

During the pandemic lockdown, Raj decided that it was time to return to his first love, painting. So in 2022 he relocated to Phoenix, where he maintains a studio and devotes himself fulltime to abstract painting. Influenced by the critical views of his father, who wrote “The sublime is not to be found in nature; it is in us,” and “color implicates not only surface values, texture and tone, but the responsive echo of the presence of the other, the ontology of the symbol and its acts,” Raj considers abstraction to be a perfect vehicle for joyful self-expression and soulful connection to the unknown.