Deo Rai is a material-based artist, who lives and works in Chicago, Illinois. He was born in Bhutan and brought up in a refugee camp in Nepal. In his childhood he grew up by doing realistic still-life, portraiture, and landscapes. Later he experimented with abstraction with different mediums. He is a current MFA student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and finished his undergrad at the University of Northern Iowa and post-baccalaureate at SAIC. Mr. Rai has been filing his skills in various mixed medias for the past several years. Arriving at SAIC has been one of the windows to extend the range of his talent even further. His works are influenced by his childhood memories and his life experiences from the refugee camp to the United States.