We draw on personal and cultural history as well as our creative imaginations". In her projects "Auto cartography I" and "Rhyme Sequence: Wiggle Waggle", the pictorial styles of the paintings are cross-cultural as well as autobiographical. Ahuja was compelled to study myths, folklore and ancient works as a way to discuss how they are represented in art. She combines her own cultural heritage with the Western art canon to explore stories and imagery related to her experience. Western art historical references are also apparent in Ahuja's work, from early Italian Renaissance paintings to impressionism and post-impressionism. Combining those Western art cannons with South Asian art traditions, Ahuja is said to "reclaim creative authorship" or agency in her self-portraiture. Ahuja cites her work as "automythography," an expansion of feminist Audre Lorde's "biomythography." Ahuja describes "automythography" as a "combination of personal narrative with cultural and personal mythology." Ahuja often paints over her own work, regarding failed paintings as an opportunity, which "allows for the sort of things you can't plan for." Ahuja is also interested in the process, building surfaces by painting, stamping to create a complex surface. "I'm thinking of the ground as a cultural space. Instead of starting with the plain page, I'm starting it with this layer of culture so that when I'm building my imagery, it's really a wrestle between the figure and the ground. In the end, there's this integrated, stitched together element between them. . . I'm interested in mixing those traditions: flatness of space, but also some perspectival space and depth into the surface. I think that's where we are in painting. I think we, as artists, now have free range to take what we want from history." In 2008, Ahuja created Tress IV, with the aim to convert the image of African American hair to a "space of infinite creative possibilities or generative possibilities." Ahuja believes that African American hair is often weighted down with "personal and cultural history." By exaggerating the image of African American hair, it shows the value that hair has in the lives of black people and how they are constantly evolving the standard of beauty, moving away from a more Eurocentric to Afrocentric idea of beauty. Her two central concerns during this period were "self-invention and self-representation." Ahuja's work has been exhibited throughout the United States as well as in Paris, Brussels, Berlin, India, Dubai, and Milan. In 2010,