Jayashree Chakravarty was born in Khoai, Tripura in 1956. She completed her Bachelors in Fine Arts from Viswa Bharati in the sprawling natural environs of Santiniketan, and then obtained her postgraduate diploma in Fine Arts from the MS University of Baroda, where she was exposed to an urban sensibility. She was also an artist in residence at Aix en Provence from 1993-95, where she was influenced in the formative years of her practice by the French movement Supports/Surfaces, especially by Claude Viallat.

Known extensively for her canvases and paper works, Jayashree initiates her process of making by toying with the cartographic possibilities of splashes, drips, and splatters that form what could be representations of topography from her past. As Adip Dutta writes, “Then appear impressions of the palm, fingers, and feet along with repetitive dots, dashes, broken lines, blobs of colour, and so on.” Her work builds around a recognisable motif of chaos, where she assimilates different surfaces into one, laying them one on top of the other, weaving them in a manner that at the same time creates and destroys the multiple landscapes that emerge. As she draws deeply from her personal/emotional memory, her works display a continuous revisiting of familiar site(s), placing nostalgia together with socio-political issues of home, migration, ecology, and habitat.

She received the Gujarat Lalit Kala Akademi Award and the Second Bharat Bhavan Biennale Award in 1988. She has also been honoured with Bombay Art Society Award, Mumbai (1980) and Honourable Mention Award, Asian Art Biennial, Dhaka, Bangladesh (1997) to name a few. The artist lives and works in Kolkata.