Sophiya Khwaja
May 3 - June 21, 2009

Born and raised in Islamabad, Pakistan, Sophiya attended the National College of Arts (NCA) in Lahore, where she selected Printmaking as her field of choice. After three years of intensive etching, she pursued a two-year Printmaking Masters program at the renowned Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) that she attended on a Fulbright Scholarship awarded in 2004. Her focus through the duration of her MFA at RISD was also primarily on etching.

Back from RISD, Sophiya now resides in Islamabad, Pakistan, with her husband and is currently exhibiting work both in Pakistan and the United States. She is also a visiting professor of Printmaking at NCA. Khwaja says, “currently I am working on a series of around ten drawings that deal with the rapid and recent change in a relatively tolerant, modern Pakistani Moslem society towards extremism. The drawings express both the comic and the terrifying side of the situation that I suddenly found myself in on my return to Pakistan.“