Naz Ikramullah
Naz Ikramullah Ashraf (born Naz Ikramullah) is a British-Canadian artist and film producer of Pakistani-Bengali origin. She was born in London to a prominent Muslim family. Her father, Mohammed Ikramullah, became Pakistan’s first Foreign Secretary, and her mother, Shaista Suhrawardy Ikramullah, was a pioneering diplomat and politician who worked with the United Nations and served as ambassador to Morocco. Her relatives include Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, a former prime minister, and Mohammad Hidayatullah, a former vice president and chief justice of India. Her sisters are Salma Sobhan and Princess Sarvath, and her brother is Inam Ikramullah.
Naz moved to West Pakistan and later settled in Canada in the 1970s. She married Canadian Urdu writer Syed Moin Ashraf in 1970; he died in 2003. They had a daughter named Aamna. He claimed descent from the Sufi saint Ashraf Jahangir Semnani.
As an artist, Naz studied at the Byam Shaw School of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art in London. She designed a filmstrip for the National Film Board of Canada’s Making Faces, which won an art-education prize in 1989. She also made a film about the culture of Muslim women in the Indian subcontinent. She teaches painting and printmaking at the Ottawa School of Art. A 1994 review described her work as blending Canadian interior life with Karachi’s exterior life through collage and architectural imagery.
Her prints and collages are in collections such as the Library of Congress, the National Gallery of Jordan, and the Cartwright Gallery in Bradford. In 2014 she published Ganga Jamuni, Silver and Gold: A Forgotten Culture, a book (with a DVD) about connections between Hindu and Muslim cultures.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 22:40 (CET).