Born in Kolkata, West Bengal, India, Sonia Mehra Chawla received her Bachelor's Degree in Fine Arts (BFA) in 2001, and Master's Degree in Fine Arts (MFA) in 2004 from Delhi University's College of Art, New Delhi, India. Chawla has an interdisciplinary practice as an artist, photographer and researcher. Her artistic practice explores notions of selfhood, nature, ecology, sustainability and conservation.

Mehra Chawla's practice is process oriented and research based, with a focus on specific locations and micro histories. Through her artistic projects, she examines how local places contribute to global changes, what drives those changes, how these contributions change over time, how and where scale matters, what are the interactions between macro-structures and micro-agencies, and how efforts at mitigation and adaptation can be locally initiated and adopted.