Swanee Jayawardene (born Suvenitha Monica Jayawardene) was a Sri Lankan modernist painter and textile innovator whose work helped redefine the relationship between fine art, craft, and everyday life in mid-twentieth-century Ceylon.

Working across painting, drawing, batik, and fashion, she belonged to a generation of artists who shaped the visual language of modern Sri Lankan art during and after independence. A member of the Colombo ’43 Group, she exhibited alongside the country’s leading modernists and developed a distinctive practice that merged European modernist influences with deeply personal and culturally rooted forms of expression.

Today, she is recognized not only as a painter, but as one of the earliest artists in Sri Lanka to treat textiles as serious contemporary art.