Maliha Abidi London, b. 1995
Maliha Abidi is a Pakistani-American multidisciplinary artist, author, and speaker based in London. Working across painting, animation, publishing, and immersive installations, her practice explores and challenges dominant narratives surrounding identity, collective memory, and gender. Drawing on experiences of displacement, her research examines how migration shapes identity and cultural memory through a feminist lens.
She is the founder of Women Rise, an initiative advocating for women’s rights and girls’ education, and BackPackX, a spatial computing platform focused on storytelling in underserved communities. Abidi’s work has been exhibited internationally in cities including London, New York, Paris, Karachi, and Miami, with venues such as Outernet London, Frameless, Hanger Gallery, and Tate Modern (as part of Instagram Creator Week), as well as The Other Art Fair. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Forbes, BBC, and Good Morning America, and she has collaborated with organisations including Adobe, UNHCR, charity: water, Meta, and Snapchat.
She is a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, holds an MA in Contemporary Art Practice from the Royal College of Art, and is currently pursuing an MFA at Ruskin School of Art at the University of Oxford.