Asha Lester was born in the US in 1991, and currently lives in Northwest Arkansas. She completed a Bachelors of Fine Arts at Parsons the New School for Design in New York City. During her Bachelors, she traveled to China for a 6-week long self-organized apprenticeship in a traditional Chinese calligraphy workshop, funded through a Student Travel Research Grant awarded by the India China Institute. She later completed a Masters in Public Art and New Artistic Strategies at Bauhaus Universitaet Weimar in Germany, where she produced her thesis project Asha’s Place, at a small kiosk on a street intersection.