Ayza Akhtar is a South Asian diasporic artist, writer, and mixed reality practitioner whose work moves through the shifting terrain of identity as lived, negotiated, and continually re-authored. In May 2026, she joins Studio 88 Artist Residency’s Evolving Identities programme, investigating femininity as a sensorial, shifting experience and tracing the moment it becomes sovereign.
Born in New Jersey, USA, and currently based in Bradford, UK, Ayza’s practice emerges from the in-between spaces of migration, memory, and cultural translation—where belonging is neither fixed nor singular, but constructed in real time through personal and collective experience.
Working across augmented reality, writing, photography, and socially engaged formats, Akhtar approaches identity as both subject and method. Her work resists reductive narratives of diaspora—particularly the familiar trope of being “torn between two worlds”—and instead insists on specificity, multiplicity, and self-determined storytelling. She foregrounds diasporic culture as something actively made: hybrid, unstable, and deeply individual, yet shaped through shared conditions of displacement and inheritance.
Her ongoing AR Print Series layers digital interventions onto physical imagery, often employing English–Urdu wordplay to disrupt language hierarchies and reframe representation. In Chai Banao (2021), Akhtar used the everyday ritual of tea—at once intimate and entangled in colonial histories—as a site for dialogue, unpacking how diasporic identities are constructed, performed, and contested within community. Across her work, South Asian women are centered outside of stereotype, repositioned through nuance, humor, and agency.
Akhtar’s writing practice runs parallel to her visual work, carrying a diasporic perspective regardless of subject matter. Her long-form and serialized texts, including her recent 100 Day Writing Project, reflect an ongoing inquiry into how identity is articulated beyond visibility—how it persists, shifts, and embeds itself even when not explicitly named. Underpinning her approach are the theoretical influences of Patricia Hill Collins’ standpoint epistemology and Jo-Ann Archibald’s Indigenous storywork, which guide her toward ethical, community-rooted modes of knowledge production and storytelling.
Alongside her artistic practice, Akhtar has an extensive background as a producer, educator, and facilitator. She has developed artist training programmes, led critical workshops on form and medium, and worked across interdisciplinary contexts that bridge creative practice with social engagement. This dual experience informs her sensitivity to process, authorship, and the responsibilities embedded in representing lived experience.
At Studio 88 Artist Residency, as part of the Evolving Identities programme, Akhtar returns to her own practice following a sustained period of producing for others. This residency marks a deliberate re-centering of making as a mode of inquiry—an opportunity to deepen and complicate her investigation into diasporic identity beyond familiar frameworks. Engaging with new contexts and communities, she seeks to expand her methodological approach, testing and reshaping her understanding of identity as relational, intersectional, and in constant negotiation.
More about Ayza Akhtar on her website and instagram.
Studio 88 accepts applications on an ongoing basis. Check out our residency program and apply now.
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