Ambreen Butt was born in Lahore, the cultural capital of Pakistan, and studied Indian and Persian Miniature Painting at Lahore's National College of Art. In 1997, she earned an MFA at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. She has developed a personal aesthetic to examine Western and Islamic cultural paradoxes and tensions as they relate to women. The subject matter in her paintings is intensely personal, but also universal in that the work addresses the female body, presence, power, silence, language, and vulnerability.