Born in Lahore, Pakistan, Shahzia Sikander underwent rigorous training under master miniaturist Bashir Ahmed. She subsequently became the first artist from the Miniature Painting Department at the NCA to challenge the medium’s technical and aesthetic framework. Shahzia Sikander’s practice takes classical Indo-Persian miniature painting as its point of departure and challenges the strict formal tropes of the genre by experimenting with scale and various forms of new media. Informed by South Asian, American, Feminist and Muslim perspectives, Sikander has developed a unique, critically charged approach to this time-honored medium—employing its continuous capacity for reinvention to interrogate ideas of language, trade and empire, and migration.