Born in Lahore, Pakistan, Shahzia Sikander received her BFA in 1991 from the National College of Arts, Lahore, Pakistan, where she underwent rigorous training under master miniaturist Bashir Ahmed. The first student Ahmed invited to teach alongside him, she subsequently became the first artist from the Miniature Painting Department at the NCA to challenge the medium’s technical and aesthetic framework. In addition, she was the first woman to teach miniature painting at the school. Sikander moved to the United States in 1993 to pursue her MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design, which she completed in 1995.

Sikander’s thesis project, The Scroll (1989-90), launched what has come to be called the neo-miniature. This breakthrough project received national critical acclaim in Pakistan, winning the prestigious Shakir Ali and Haji Sharif awards for excellence in miniature painting and launching the medium into the forefront of the NCA’s program. Sikander’s innovative work led to her meteoric rise internationally in the mid-nineties with survey exhibitions at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago (1998), the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art (1998), the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (1999), and the Whitney Museum of American Art (2000).  

Shahzia Sikander ’s pioneering 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 media including painting, drawing, animation, installation, video and film. 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. 

Shahzia Sikander will be the subject of a traveling exhibition titled Shahzia Sikander: Extraordinary Realities. The exhibition will open at The Morgan Library, New York in June 2021 followed by the RISD Museum, Rhode Island in November 2021, and MFA Houston, Texas in Spring 2022. On the occasion of these exhibitions, there will be a major new monograph printed. Extraordinary Realities, is an exhaustive examination of Sikander’s work from 1987 to 2003, charting her early development as an artist in Lahore and the United States, and foregrounding her critical role in bringing miniature painting into dialogue with contemporary art. Edited by Jan Howard and Sadia Abbas, with contributions by Gayatri Gopinath, Faisal Devji, Kishwar Rizvi, Sadia Abbas, Jan Howard, Vasif Kortun, Dennis Congdon, Bashir Ahmed, Rick Lowe and Julie Mehretu.

Sikander has had major solo exhibitions throughout the world, including the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, North Carolina (2019); the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco (2017); the Aga Khan Museum, Toronto (2017); MAXXI | Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome (2016); the Asia Society Hong Kong Center, Hong Kong (2016); the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao (2015); the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C. (2012); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2010); the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2007); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2007); the Pérez Art Museum Miami (2005); and at the San Diego Museum of Art, California (2004). Sikander has also participated in significant international group shows such as Miniature 2.0,Pera Art Musuem, Istanbul, Turkey (2020); We Do Not Dream Alone, Asia Society Triennial, Asia Society, New York (2020); Modest Fashion, Stedelijk Museum, Schiedam, The Netherlands (2019); Shehr-O-Funn, Lahore Biennale 01, Pakistan (2018); Witness, Karachi Biennale 17, Pakistan (2017); Our Land / Alien Territory, 6th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, Manege, Russia (2015); Infinite Challenge, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul (2014); Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh (2014); Mom, am I barbarian? 13th Istanbul Biennial, Turkey (2013); If you were to live here…5th Auckland Triennial, New Zealand (2013); Re:emerge, Towards a New Cultural Cartography, Sharjah Biennale 11, Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE (2013); Future Pass: From Asia to the World, 54th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, Italy (2011); Taswir: Pictorial Mappings of Islam of Modernity, Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin (2009); Without Boundaries, Seventeen Ways of Looking, the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2006); Always a little further, 51st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, Italy (2005); and the Whitney Biennial, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1997).

Amongst the numerous awards, grants, and fellowships Sikander has received are the KB17 Karachi Biennale Shahneela and Farhan Faruqui Popular Choice Art Prize (2017); the Religion and the Arts Award (2016); the Asia Society Award for Significant Contribution to Contemporary Art (2015); the National Medal of Arts Award presented by U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Rodham Clinton (2012); the John D. and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation Achievement ‘Genius’ award, (2006), and Tamgha-e-Imtiaz, the National Pride of Honor Award presented by the Pakistani Government (2005).

Her work can be found in the permanent collections of many prestigious institutions worldwide, including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Australia; Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas, Austin; Brooklyn Museum, New York; DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Athens; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; Linda Pace Foundation, San Antonio; MAXXI | Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, amongst others. In 2017, Sikander’s first major public art commission, a spectacular sixty-six-foot mosaic and a twenty-five-foot luminous multilayered glass painting, was installed in the Economics Department and Louis A. Simpson International Building at Princeton University. In the same year, MoMA Publications released a children’s book about Sikander entitled, Shahzia Sikander: My Life as an Artist.

Sikander lives and works in New York City.