Gautam Rao is an artist and Associate Professor of Art at Butler University. Born in 1977 in Washington D.C., he has also lived in Bangalore, India. He has designed playable, whimsical mini-golf sculptures for the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Elmhurst Art Museum and BLINK: the Cincinnati light festival. His typographic artworks have been exhibited at Typeforce V in Chicago and the Queens Museum of Art.

Books he has illustrated include: Mid-Century Modern Sherlock Holmes, published in 2021 and The Children's Book of Jeeves & Wooster, published in 2019. He lives with his wife and two children in Indianapolis, Indiana.