Venkat Raman Singh Shyam (born 28 October 1970) is a contemporary Indian artist who works with murals, etchings, mixed media and animation.

[1] Venkat Raman Singh Shyam was born into a Pardhan Gond family in the village of Sijhora, situated 80 km from Patangarh in eastern Madhya Pradesh.

[2] Venkat lived with his family in Sijhora till 1986, when his uncle, the famous Gond artist Jangarh Singh Shyam visited them.

Around this time, Venkat also developed his own figural style as he began painting signboards for a meagre fifty rupees per day.

Eventually, an altercation with Aadhara Bai led Venkat to leave his uncle's house for Delhi where he worked as domestic help in a police officer's household for some time until he managed to escape the exploitative conditions with a group of painters.

His wife, Saroj Shyam, who hails from the village Rasoi, is also an artist who grew up close to the Baiga tribe and is as aware of their stories and legends as she is with Gond myths.

By the time of his introduction to Jagdish Swaminathan, he had worked as a footloose labourer, domestic help, signboard artist and house painter.

Venkat then worked with the Development Commissioner for Handicrafts in Delhi and produced greeting cards for the 2000 millennial celebrations in Khajuraho.

His latest exhibition, along with his wife Saroj Shyam's works, is forthcoming at the Radford University Art Museum in Virginia, USA.

He described the evolution of the media used in Gond art and its increasingly urban existence in an interview: “Earlier, we used mice hair in place of a brush, while limestone or charcoal were our colour mediums.