Aruna has been painting since she was three — long before she had words for what she felt, she already had color, line, and movement. She grew up understanding art not as something you make, but as something you live inside: in the fall of light, in the silence between moments, in the fragile threads connecting people to the world around them. That same instinct — to search for the structure hidden beneath the surface of things — draws her equally to Einstein’s general relativity, to a blank canvas, and to the whiteboard of a startup pitch. For Aruna, brush and equation are simply two languages asking the same question: what holds the world together?
A 10th-grade student in Shymkent with a 3.98/4.0 GPA and a candidate for Kazakhstan’s “Altyn Belgi” honor for top graduates, Aruna is building two ventures at once. ReClad AI reads drone, satellite, and thermal imagery of aging, energy-hungry buildings and proposes how to give them a second life — green facades, solar panels, recycled materials — translating the results into energy and CO₂ saved. SolarYield Predictor forecasts a solar plant’s output 72 hours ahead so operators lose less to inaccurate-forecast penalties, piloted at Otrar LLP in Kazakhstan’s Turkestan Region. She also founded ConceptLab, a bilingual (Russian/English) peer-to-peer community helping students worldwide build real portfolios and reach the universities they dream of, believing — as she does about art — that nothing she creates means much unless it’s shared. In 2026, she placed 2nd in the world in the Harvard Crimson Business Competition’s Global Championship Round, after finishing in the top 20% of the first round, and took part in Harvard Model United Nations China, with a trip to the Boston conference already on her calendar.
Painting remains close to her heart: her work has taken first place in London and Astana, been nominated in Paris and Florence, and been exhibited across China, Italy, France, and the UK. She is also teaching herself to write and produce music, currently finishing her first song, with lyrics in Kazakh, alongside playing guitar and piano. Her sense of responsibility extends to the planet itself: she coordinates the eco-volunteer organization New Wave NGO, co-founded the volunteer group Volunteer Flow in Almaty, volunteered at IOAI 2026, and spent time on Bali protecting sea turtles.
To Aruna, none of this is a list of separate achievements — it’s one way of seeing, held up to different materials: canvas, code, community. She doesn’t create images, or simply launch projects; she creates invitations — moments where beauty draws people in, and meaning asks them to stay, because she believes everything is, in the end, connected. Learn more here.