Mequitta Ahuja (born 1976) is a contemporary American feminist painter of African American and South Asian descent who lives in Baltimore, Maryland. Ahuja creates works of self-portraiture that combine themes of myth and legend with personal identity. Early life Mequitta Ahuja was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan to Indian and African-American parents, hailing from New Delhi and Cincinnati respectively. Ahuja grew up in a largely white community in Connecticut, and had little contact with African American communities and culture. Her upbringing in this environment is a common subject in her work. Ahuja received her BA at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts in 1998, and her MFA at University of Illinois at Chicago in 2003, where she was mentored by contemporary artist Kerry James Marshall. Career and Works In 2007, in Ahuja's debut exhibition in New York city, New York Times art critic Holland Cotter said of Ahuja's work, "Referring to the artist's African-American and East Indian background, the pictures turn marginality into a regal condition". Ahuja's art explores the social construction of issues such as race, gender, and identity through a technique of self-portraiture. To create her paintings, Ahuja relies on a three-step process that involves performance, photography, and drawing/painting. Ahuja begins by developing a series of performances involving costumes, props, and poses. With the aid of a remote shutter, she then photographs her performances and documents them as "non-fictional source material." Finally, she incorporates these photographs into her invented material, resulting in her completed self-portraits. Ahuja has discussed her paintings as being feminist, referring to the assertive, self-sufficient female presence prevalent in her work, and frequently turns to her African American and South Asian roots in her consideration of identity issues. She states that through her art, "I feel I can have relationships to these groups on my own terms". In 2007, Ahuja was included in the exhibition Global Feminisms at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and in 2009 her painting "Dream Region", reflecting her various identities, was featured as the cover of the book War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art. Ahuja appropriates ancient works of myth and legend, such as the fifteenth century Persian manuscript and Mughal miniature paintings, into her own commitment to certain kinds of identity fabrication. She articulated her own artistic style as "Of primary concern to me is the agency we have to self-invent and self-represent... creative processes that are necessarily bricolage.