Chila Kumari Singh Burman (Punjabi: ਚਿਲਾ ਕੁਮਾਰੀ ਬਰਮਨ) is a British artist, celebrated for her radical feminist practice which examines representation, gender and cultural identity. She works across a wide range of mediums including printmaking, drawing, painting, installation and film. A significant figure in the Black British Art movement of the 1980s, Burman remains one of the first British Asian female artists to have a monograph written about her work; Lynda Nead's Chila Kumari Burman: Beyond Two Cultures (1995). In 2018, she received an honorary doctorate from University of the Arts London for her impact and recognised legacy as an international artist. In 2020 she was invited into the Art Workers' Guild as a Brother and in 2022, Burman was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the Queen's Birthday Honours for services to visual art. Early life Born in Bootle near Liverpool to Hindu Punjabi parents, Burman attended the Southport College of Art, Leeds Polytechnic and the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL where she graduated in 1982. Career For over four decades, Burman's practice has been at the intersection of feminism, race and representation. A key figure in the British Black Arts movement in the 1980s, Burman has remained rooted in her understanding of the diverse nature of culture. Continually seeking to break stereotypes and emancipate the image of women, she often uses self-portraiture as a tool of empowerment and self-determination. In the 1980s her work was shown in a number of seminal group shows including Four Indian Women Artists (UK Artists Gallery, 1982); Black Women Time Now (Battersea Arts Centre, London, 1983); The Thin Black Line (ICA, London, 1985); Black Art: New Directions (Stoke on Trent Museum and Art Gallery, 1989) and the feminist exhibition Along the Lines of Resistance (Rochdale Art Gallery and touring, 1989). In the 1990s and 2000s Burman's works more explicitly explored her family history, specifically her father's work as an ice-cream van man in Bootle (in her exhibitions Candy-Pop & Juicy Lucy, Stephen Lawrence Gallery, University of Greenwich, London, 2006; Ice Cream and Magic, The Pump House, People's History Museum, Manchester, 1997). In the 1990s, her work was featured in the Fifth Havana Biennale (1994); Transforming the Crown (Studio Museum, Harlem and Bronx Museum, New York, 1997); Genders and Nations (with Shirin Neshat; Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, New York State, 1998). Her retrospective