Calida Garcia Rawles (born 1976 in Wilmington, Delaware) is a Los Angeles–based painter whose large-scale canvases fuse hyperrealism with poetic abstraction to explore themes of race, identity, history, and recovery through the medium of water. She earned her B.A. in Painting from Spelman College (1998) and an M.A. from New York University (2000)

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She began her painting practice at Spelman College, inspired by Black women artists like Carrie Mae Weems and Elizabeth Catlett, and deepened her craft with graduate work at NYU The Delaware Contemporary. After moving to Los Angeles in 2004, she transitioned from graphic design to fine art. In 2015, she discovered the emotional and spiritual resonance of water through therapeutic swimming, channeling that revelation into her paintings .