Mequitta Ahuja is a painter whose work repositions the self-portrait-particularly that of women of color-as a broader inquiry into the history and practice of painting itself. Of South Asian and African American descent, Ahuja places herself prominently within her compositions while shifting attention away from autobiography toward painting as a received and evolving form. Her large-scale works catalogue and repurpose conventions drawn from centuries of figurative traditions, including Egyptian art, Giotto frescoes, Hindu figuration, and early American painting, combining abstraction, illusion, text, and trompe l’oeil. Ahuja received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2018. She earned her BA from Hampshire College and her MFA from the University of Illinois, and her work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including the Brooklyn Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, Saatchi Gallery, Crystal Bridges, and the Baltimore Museum of Art. She lives and works in Norwalk, Connecticut.