Business and Art Have a Symbiotic Relationship in Tanisha Raj’s Creative World
Celeste Sunderland Gottfried- Apr 29
- 4 min read
Tanisha Raj has something most artists do not. A business degree. And like any good business strategist, she doesn’t jump into anything too risky without a good plan. So when she found herself spending more and more time making art, she set a goal for herself.
“I'm a very practical person with a strategic business mindset,” she says, “so I was like, okay if I sell three pieces by the end of the year, I'll keep doing it.”
Word got around, Instagram posts were shared, and soon, Tanisha Raj’s art and woodcuts were hanging in homes from Pennsylvania to Singapore. Suffice to say, she reached her goal, and she hasn’t stopped since.
Based in Lisbon, where she makes intricate wood carvings in a bright, communal studio she shares with seven other artists, Raj enjoys the mutual benefits that having both a business and art education provide. She takes a grounded, holistic approach to her art career, setting goals and KPIs for herself in order to ensure sustainability, and considers aspects like pricing, marketing, and product as “different operational departments that impact one another,” she explains.
On the other hand, her artistic side empowers her to break the mold of traditional corporate thinking. When working with business clients she draws on unique ways of storytelling that incorporate emotional context and take more than facts and figures into account to showcase success. This distinctive merging of creative inputs with practical business finesse has led Raj on a journey that has attracted a great deal of serendipity.
Growing up between Hong Kong and London, Raj didn’t set out to be an artist. But at 16, while at summer camp in New Hampshire getting a feel for what it might be like to study in the U.S., she signed up for a print-making class and fell in love with woodcutting.
“At the end of the summer I took home my woodblock but not any of my prints,” she recalls. “I probably made hundreds of prints, but for some reason I just really loved that block of wood.”
Raj went home to Hong Kong and enrolled at Emory University in Atlanta to study business. She never intended to study art, but as fate would have it, Emory cut their art program that same year, which of course piqued her interest. “When they take something away you're like— wait a second I want to do that!” she says.
As luck would have it, Emory decided to establish a program called the IVAC, an integrated visual arts co-major, open to students interested in studying art as a second major. Raj was one of five students in the program that first year, and she enjoyed being able to explore her creative side in tandem with earning a business degree.
After graduating, Raj landed a job at BCG Brighthouse, a division of the Boston Consulting Group with a focus on purpose consulting. She was doing things like helping Fortune 500 companies articulate their purpose and working with business leaders to integrate their values into their company culture. But after a year, her visa expired, and her number didn’t come up in the lottery for renewal. And then, Raj got lucky again.
BCG Brighthouse was opening their first European office in Berlin, and they invited her to come along. “It all happened very quickly in May, 2018, I was 22,” she recalls. “One of the directors invited me to go for a year, help build the team, and then I could try again for the U.S. visa. So I said okay sounds good, just one year in Berlin.”
But again, the visa wasn’t renewed. So she stayed in Berlin. And we all know what happened next. The pandemic. Many of the things she loved about her job — being with her colleagues, working together, the community of it — fell away during the lockdown. And that’s when she began to question her life’s purpose.
“For the first time I started thinking, could I be doing something else with my life? Is this really what I want? BrightHouse was my dream job, it was the only thing I applied for out of college, I really, really loved it. I moved across the world for it. But COVID just kind of planted that little seed.”
Lisbon was a place she kept going back to. She felt happier, lighter, whenever she was there.
“Eventually, once I was no longer in a full-time corporate role and felt confident enough in my art career, I thought, why couldn't I feel that Lisbon joy for even more months in the year. There was no specific event, but rather a slow move led by a strong intuition that Lisbon is where I should be.”
So in November, 2023 Raj relocated, and it seems she’s found her happy place. She keeps her strategy skills sharp by taking on consulting projects now and then, but her big focus now is making art.
Raj carves on MDF (medium-density fiberboard) panels — satisfying surfaces, which are softer and lighter than actual wood. She starts by delineating shapes with masking tape and filling them in with colorful acrylic paint or black sumi ink. Once it’s dried, she starts carving. She doesn’t have a formal composition in mind when starting a piece, she simply succumbs to the soothing rhythm of the tool against the wood, and sees where it takes her.
Bold colors and geometric forms often take shape on her canvas. Circles, inspired by sacred mandalas in Hindu art, pay homage to her Indian heritage while vivid geometric colorscapes tribute Indian artist S.H. Raza, a favorite of Raj’s parents. Since moving to Lisbon her work has taken on a much brighter hue. “It's funny actually to see it all together in the same room, the Berlin stuff and the Lisbon stuff,” she says. “You definitely notice a color change.”
Thank you to Celeste for capturing Tanisha's story. If you like her work, you can see it in person at Basel Art Summer Camp this June. RSVP here to be notified when her pieces go up:
Comments