Asma Chaudhry

Asma Chaudhry has been associated with the field of journalism for 10 years. She started her career as Sub Editor in Jang Group of News papers, Asma soon got associated with the state television and worked there as a producer. She was the recipient of PTV award for program Vision Pakistan in 2003. 

Later she worked with the top rated channels of Pakistan as a producer and then anchored Program �Parliament Cafeteria� from parliament with prominent political personalities of Pakistan. As special diplomatic correspondent she covered the AGRA summit, SAARC summit, us presidential elections 2008 and also visited for special assignments in USA, UK, India, Germany, Srilanka, Afghanistan, Bangladesh. 

Ms Chaudhry has also participated in IVL program by state department USA on Documentary Productions and Film Making.

Aasiya Riaz

Aasiya Riaz, Joint Director of PILDAT coordinates various research projects within PILDAT and manages PILDAT’s projects and activities as PILDAT's co-director. 

She has over 8 years’ experience of working in the field of research, management, analysis and coordination. She has been working in the areas of democratic and legislative strengthening; research on political and public policy issues; civil-military relations; dialogues between the Muslim World and the West and Electoral Process, etc. Trained in the field of media and political communication at the London School of Economics, UK, Aasiya has worked with the mainstream press and electronic media in Pakistan as well. 

She was also a Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy where she worked on US Think Tanks and the subject of Civil-Military Relations. Aasiya also graduated from the Stanford University, USA Course on Democracy, Development and Rule of Law in August 2007.

Roshaneh Zafar

Roshaneh Zafar Founder & Managing Director, Kashf Foundation 

Ms Roshaneh Zafar is a graduate of the Wharton Business School, University of Pennsylvania, USA and also holds a Masters degree in Development Economics from Yale University, USA.  She has worked with the World Bank as a women-in-development research associate on the water and sanitation sectors.  Ms Zafar founded Kashf Foundation in 1996 after a chance meeting with Professor Yunus.  She has diverse skills in financial management, participatory appraisal techniques, gender and other related fields.  She is also involved with other civil society organisations like Sahil (which is working against child sexual abuse), Sungi Development Foundation and the Family Planning Association of Pakistan.

Andleeb Abbas

Andleeb Abbas has been involved in the field of training and consultancy for the last 12 years. She specializes in the areas of Strategic Management and marketing strategy and has trained nearly all top local and multinational organizations. She is presently running her own training institute in Lahore, by the name of Institute of Marketing & Sales (Profile of the institute is available at www.imsknowledge.com) She is also the CEO of the world’s largest training and consulting brand by the name of FranklinCovey Pakistan. 

She is a training and marketing consultant to the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, and DFID. She is also a visiting faculty member at LUMS, LSE and Imperial College. She has published 30 papers and over 500 articles and currently writes for DAWN and NEWS Sunday magazine. In 2002 she was the only Pakistani to be declared as one of the top 30 Strategic Thinkers in the world by the World Bank Washington DC social development department, and consequently was invited to assist the World Bank in preparing their next 10 year strategic plan.

Tasneem Peerzada

Tasneem Peerzada has had a varied and diverse professional career –it spans the entire spectrum from beginning as a primary and secondary school teacher, to a journalist, a playwright, a lyricist, a press and public relations coordinator, and last, but not least, a poet. After her professional origins in the educational establishment, Tasneem moved onto a more potent public forum by joining “The Daily Jang” as a journalist. At this leading Urdu language newspaper she worked in both the capacities of an editor and a featured columnist, incorporating all forms of current social and political issues in her writing. 

She covered Television, Film, Theatre, and political personalities under human interest, reported on social and political dilemmas for awareness, and also covered fashion for the front pages of the media and entertainment sections. Tasneem later wove all these fundamental elements into a singular vocational focus when she joined the Rafi Peer Theatre Workshop as a company director.  Here she wrote scripts for TV shows, awareness productions (whether on anti-narcotics or children’s education), theatre skits, as well as lyrics and songs for product anthems, corporate launches, and Television jingles. She also became an ardent media and press coordinator for the Peer Group and its sister companies as well as a dire

Mahvash Waqar

Mahvash Waqar is a Pakistani artist and current band member of the Laal Band. She is the backup vocalist for the band.  She has also been famous for a stint on the radio network as a RJ.

Mahvash studied Textile designing from the National College of Arts in Lahore, Pakistan. She had a keen interest in music from the beginning. So, instead of continuing her studies she decided to join what was then a very new phenomenon of FM radio stations.

Mahvash began her music career in early 2007 when she decided to be a part of the newly formed Laal Band along with Haider Rehman, Aamir, Asif, Salman and Jamal.  The band was formed in response to the 2007 sacking of judges by then President Pervez Musharraf.

Mahvash has played backup vocals for Laal band's debut album, Umeed e Sahar.

Fereeha Idrees

Born in Lahore, Fereeha Idrees did her Masters in Broadcast Journalism from the University of Westminster, London. She’s been affiliated with the media industry since the last ten years. She started her career in 2000 and since then has gained tremendous experience as a writer, editor, documentary maker, journalist, producer and anchor. In January 2011, Fereeha took over SAMAA's primetime program 'News Beat'. 

Fereeha's other interests include reading literature. She is also working with the Muslim Council of Britain, Evening Standard, Eastern Eye, Daily Mirror and blogs for The Guardian's Comment. Her documentary 'Unsung Heroes' was nominated for the Banff Awards.

Maira Khan

Maira Khan, A well known actress/model/anchor who has all that is require - looks, attitude and ofcourse talent. Maira have already won the hearts of many fans around the world. Maira started off with her career 7 years ago as a model. Then different directors casted her in TV dramas. Till now, Maira have done more than 50 drama serials and sitcoms. Such as, "Yaad Piya Ki Aaye, Sooli, Chingariyan, Khumar, Kanpur Se Katas Tak, Kya Chaha Kya Paya, Dil-e-Nadaan, Justuju Jiski Thi ,Imtehan,No.1,Good News and Qabool Hai.

Maira is also known is one of the good stage performer.

As many of you have seen her performances on "ARY NACHLE and different award shows".

A warm-hearted Piscean, Maira Khan, was born on 15th March in Lahore to her parents and have one younger sister and a brother. Completing her Matriculation from a private school and Intermediate from a Government College in Lahore. She has also done Bachelors of Commerce as a private candidate.

Iman Ali

Iman Ali is one of the top Pakistani models. Iman was born in Lahore Punjab (Pakistan). She is daughter of television/film actor Abid Ali and Humaira Ali (first wife of Abid Ali). She has two younger sisters Maryam and Raimah Ali. Her parents divorced when she was young and Ali has confessed to having a ‘distant’ relationship with her father.

Modeling Carrier:

No doubt! That Iman Ali is considered in top Pakistani models. Aman has worked for most of the Pakistani designers. Not only this, she also modeled for Indian designers . She is considered perfect model due to her personality and perfect height.

Acting Carrier:

In 2007, Iman was signed in Shoaib Mansoor’s film Khuda Kay Liye, her acting was met with critical acclaim and earned her the Lux Style Award for ‘Best Actress’ in 2008. However, she, like her father has before acted in drama serials. She will appear next in Shoaib Mansoor’s Bol opposite Atif Aslam, Mahira Khan, Humamima Abbasi and others.

Personal life:

In 2009, Ali confirmed in an interview on the Nadia Khan Show that she was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. Same year she was widely reported to have been to India to find an alternative therapy, citing allopathic treatment ‘too expensive’. Some media outlets covered the trip to India as a career move, but she strongly denied any such plans. She is single, and resides in Lahore. She has mentioned in an interview with Shaista Wahidi on popular morning show Good Morning Pakistan, “I don’t want a Ferrari owner, I just want a guy who can live and is capable of looking after her that’s it. Riches don’t do it for me. Money doesn’t impress me’.

Dr. Saadia Virk

Dr. Saadia Virk, CEO at South City Hospital Karachi is a graduate of Fatima Jinnah Medical College, Lahore. After completing her postgraduate training at the Aga Khan University she went for further training to UK and obtained Membership of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. In the UK she worked in institutions of excellence and obtained special training in general Gynaecology, Urogynaecolgoy, Oncology, Assisted Reproduction and high risk Obstetrics.

On return to Pakistan, with her leadership skills, she established departments of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at the Mid East Hospital and a centre of Assisted Reproduction at Australian Concept Infertility Centre in Karachi.

In 2008 she took the lead in establishing and inaugurating South City Hospital which is a state-of-the-art facility for surgical specialties. At present she is the Chief Executive Officer and the Chairperson of the Board of Directors of this Hospital.

Clinical work is her second area of excellence. Her expertise lies in management of high risk pregnancies, infertility, assisted reproduction, oncology and laparoscopic surgery including LAVH, ovarian cystectomies, myomectomies, ectopics and endometriosis. She is also well versed with conventional general gynaecology. In recognition of her clinical work and leadership skills she has recently been awarded the Fellowship of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists.

Under Dr. Saadia Virk’s supervision, South City Hospital is now an established and recognized centre for laparoscopic surgeries in gynaecology and general surgery.

Sara Taseer Shoaib

Sara Taseer Shoaib is a trained gemologist qualified from the Gemological Institute of America GIA. She graduated at the top of her class and completed the jewellery design segment of her training with outstanding honors. She is also a graduate from the London School of Economics and has a sound background in finance. She has worked internationally at Citibank, and ABN Amro Hong Kong. Sara has spent 10 years in the diamond industry in New York and Hong Kong and established a reputation for her design and flair. Her last exhibition in Hong Kong was at the renowned Harvey Nichols store.

Sara has opened her flag ship store in Lahore, in February 2009. Despite hailing from Pakistan’s premier business and political families, Sara has always charted her own course and become an internationally recognized name in elegant jewellery design. Sara has chosen to open in Pakistan, during one of the most trying periods in the history of Pakistan. This is a reflection of her ever strong love for her country and a belief in its viability and potential.

Sara manufactures in Hong Kong where she resides with her husband and three children. Her focus is keenly on quality. Unable to detach herself from her subcontinental roots, and a staunch patriot Sara is committed to the marriage of western modern straight line design with eastern color and motif. Sara produces pieces of insurmountable quality and presents them within the relevance of Pakistani culture. Sara shows through exhibitions in New York, Hong Kong, London, Singapore and Tokyo.

Sara is a true grass roots designer of our time and her passion and creativity brings a new standard of jewellery to Pakistan .

Prof Anna Molka Ahmed

Prof Anna Molka Ahmed (1917 - 1994) was a famous Pakistani artist and pioneer of fine arts in the newly born Pakistan in 1947. She was a professor of fine arts at the University of the Punjab in Lahore. She was among the pioneers of women artists in Pakistan and had been a long-time director and moving spirit behind the Fine Arts Department of the Punjab University, Lahore - the first institution that was opened to the women artists in Pakistan. "In fact she has been the facilitator of a movement that made the proactive role of women artists a possibility". writes Nilofur Farrukh (president of International Art Critics Association, Pakistan Section). It is because of trendsetters like her that the feminist art in Pakistan is gaining strength away from traditional gender discriminatory dominance. In fact these days we are witnessing a gradual dismantling of social and gender classifications. Well this has not been easy, since a lot of women had to struggle hard to bring women atop many a prestigious positions - above men, Ana Molka Ahmed is one such women. She started evening art classes at Lahore Arts Council (Alhamra) and later in a village near Lahore. Her untiring efforts gradually upgraded art education beyond B.A to M.A. in fine art at the Punjab University. She was Head of fine art department from 1940-1978. Her contribution to art education and its promotion heas been most influential. Her paintings and sculpture are found in many public and private collections in Pakistan and abroad.

She was born to Jewish parents, in London, UK in 1917. Her mother was Polish and father was a Russian. She studied painting, sculpture and design at St. Martin School of Arts, London. She converted to Islam at the age of 18 in 1935, before marrying Sheikh Ahmed, a would be Pakistani in October 1939. The couple moved to the Indian subcontinent in 1940-41 and settled in Lahore. Although, her marriage was over in 1951, but yet she lived in Pakistan with her two daughters. She was awarded Tamgha-i-Imtiaz, for her services in the field of fine arts education in the country. Professor Emeritus Anna Molka Ahmed set up a department, which has now become a center of excellence for Fine Arts in Pakistan. At the time of independence, there were only five or six Muslim students in the art department, and Anna Molka Ahmed went from one college to another seeking students for the arts department and thus was able to introduce art courses in the Punjab University. Her students became famous artists in the country and many of them are playing their role globally.

Beside painting, she was an avid gardener. She would wear her trade mark while tending the garden, cutting hedges in new and artistic pattern, and went on painting and gardening till the very last time until she was ordered by the doctors to stop because it was straining her health badly. Anna Molka also took to writing poetry in later part of her life. She breathed her last in 1994.

Huma Mulji

Huma Mulji's work has moved more and more towards looking at the absurdities of a post-colonial society in transition, taking on board the visual and cultural overlaps of language, image and taste, that create the most fantastic collisions. She describes the time we live in as moving at a remarkable speed and in regard to Pakistan Mulji refers to the experience of 'living 200 years in the past and 30 years in the future all at once'. She is interested in looking at this phenomenon with humor, to recognize the irony of it, formally and conceptually. Rather than dwell on and follow existing theoretical issues of living and working in a post-colonial nation, and applying those stagnant studies to a lived existence she examines the pace of cultural change through her art work.

Mulji's sculptural works respond to the possibilities of making things in Pakistan, and embrace low-tech methods of “making”, together with materials and forms that come from another time, and that are “imported”, “newly discovered” or “re-appropriated”. For example the work Arabian Delight is a low-tech taxidermy camel, stuffed in a suitcase. It plays with ideas of travel, transition, and of mental and physical movement, combined with an old world symbol of the camel, forced into the suitcase, looking formally uncomfortable, but nonetheless happy. This particular work also examines the relationship between Pakistan and the Gulf States and the manipulation of the Governments of Pakistan, the “Arabisation” of the country, for years, towards all but wiping out a “south Asian” identity, to replace it with a “Muslim” identity. For Mulji, this in itself, is forced, unnatural, and disagreeable. However, she also approaches this problem from the angle of someone living within it: therefore looking at it with humor, and recognizing the absurd results of the situation, in daily life, and through interactions with each other, and the world.

The photographic series Sirf Tum (only you) from 2004 and from 2008, similarly address such absurd collisions. Sirf Tum deals with issues related to intimacy in public spaces. Surveying the frame through the lens, the camera zooms in, becoming the voyeur, awkwardly, confidently, watching and disapproving at once. The protagonists are second hand dolls bought from piles of toys sold around Lunda Bazaar in Lahore, incidentally brought into Pakistan with salvation army clothing from another world, leftover from some child’s summer holiday. Already on the Periphery of society, the naked couple is placed in locales that challenge and are challenged by their scale, creating a hyper-real space, a hyper-real narrative, a “plastic” story, convincing and disturbing at the same time. In the 2008 series, the two seemingly interactive narratives engage with each other visually, but don’t really converse. Which of the narratives is real? This also brings into question contemporary media images, and the phenomenon of “photoshop”, where the fine line between truth and untruth becomes a matter of belief.

The newer work, with the taxidermic buffaloes, and the photographs of buffaloes in the landscape, continue to be informed by the absurd and incongruous visual confrontations in a country desiring to be at once the most forward-looking, and unable and unwilling to negotiate its traditional values with this idea of progress.

Heavenly Heights and Her Suburban Dream both attempt to juxtapose these colliding metaphors, to envision this surreal reality. The work avoids easy taking of sides, or didactics, in imagining a future urban landscape of Pakistan. Sculpturally too, the work underscores the conflict. The suspension of volume and weight, and the pushing of anatomical possibilities to emphasize the tension.

Shahzia Sikander

Shahzia Sikander (b. 1969, Lahore, Pakistan) is a painter, living in New York City. She earned a BFA in 1992 at the National College of Arts in Lahore, Pakistan; and an MFA in 1995 at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island.

She has had solo exhibitions at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (1999/2000) and at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago (1998). Her work has been shown in group exhibitions at the Whitney Museum (1999/2000 and 1999), at the Third Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane, Australia (1999), and at the Ludwig Museum, Cologne, Germany (1999).

Sikander has been schooled in the miniature painting tradition of Pakistan, and combines the historic iconography and technique with her own aesthetics resulting in a hybrid of traditional and contemporary styles. The imagery in her work references the tensions that exist in Islam, Hinduism and Christianity as well as her personal history, politics, and sexuality. Religion is a significant element in her art as well as her personal life, as she is a practicing Muslim. Sikander explores in particular, the role of Muslim women and challenges the view Westerners have of associating Islam only with terrorism and oppression of women.

She has been granted the "genius grant" for 2006 by the MacArthur Foundation.