Murad Mumtaz is making a big impact in the art world while at the same time keeping the focus of his own art small.  The Lahore, Pakistan native is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in South Asian Art in our Art and Architectural History graduate program. His doctoral research studies devotional portraiture in South Asian painting and eighteenth-century interactions between the artistic schools of the Punjab Hills and Plains. This year Murad is on a one-year Theodore Rousseau Fellowship awarded by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in support of his study the museum’s South Asian collections, as well as an opportunity to study Indian paintings in the European collections. He previously received his MFA from Columbia University, where he attended on a Fulbright Fellowship. In addition to being an art historian, Murad is an acclaimed artist trained in his native land in the traditional art of Indian miniature painting. His paintings capture and meditate on the fast-fading traces of traditional culture disappearing in the materialistic landscape of contemporary life.