One of the most influential artists working today, Pakistani-American Shahzia Sikander is widely celebrated for expanding and subverting pre-modern and classical Central and South-Asian miniature painting traditions and launching the form known today as neo-miniature. By bringing traditional and historical practice into dialogue with contemporary international art practices, Sikander’s multivalent and investigative work examines colonial archives to readdress orientalist narratives in Western art history from a feminist perspective. Sikander’s paintings, video animations, mosaics and sculpture explore gender roles and sexuality, cultural identity, racial narratives, and colonial and postcolonial histories through a blending of traditional motifs and contemporary imagery.

Sikander is widely celebrated for subverting Central and South-Asian miniature painting traditions and launching the form known today as neo-miniature. Born in Lahore, Pakistan, Sikander earned a B.F.A. in 1991 from the National College of Arts (NCA) in Lahore. Sikander’s breakthrough work, The Scroll, 1989–90, received national critical acclaim in Pakistan and brought international recognition to this medium within contemporary art practices in the 1990s. Sikander got her M.F.A. at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1995. Over the subsequent twenty plus years, Sikander’s practice - which has expanded to include paintings, media work and most recently, sculpture, has been pivotal in showcasing art of the South Asian diaspora as a contemporary American tradition. Solo exhibitions include the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in Texas; the Morgan Library and Museum in New York; the RISD Museum in Providence, Rhode Island; Jesus College in Cambridge, United Kingdom; the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney; the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., among many others. Sikander has also been featured in group exhibitions at international venues, including the Sharjah Biennial 11; the 8th and 13th Istanbul Biennials; the National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC; the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo; and the 54th Venice Biennale in Italy, among others. Sikander's work is in many major public collections including the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, the Brooklyn Museum, the Deutsche Bank collection, Germany, the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Sharjah Art Foundation Collection, United Arab Emirates, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Sikander has been the recipient of many notable awards, including most recently the Pollock Prize for Creativity in 2023, the Fukuoka Arts and Culture Prize in 2022, the Asia Society Award for Significant Contribution to Contemporary Art in 2015, a Medal of Art by the U.S. Department of State in 2012, and a MacArthur Fellowship in 2006. In conjunction with her traveling exhibition, an extensive monograph examining Sikander’s work from 1987 to 2003, entitled Extraordinary Realities, was published in 2021. Sikander's major new outdoor project, an 18 foot and an 8 foot bronze female sculpture, are currently on view in Madison Square Park and on the roof of the Appellate Courthouse in Manhattan, till June 2023.

Sikander currently lives and works in New York.