Murad Khan Mumtaz born in 1980, a native of Lahore, Pakistan, is an artist and researcher, completed his PhD in South Asian art history at the University of Virginia, in 2018 and is an Associate Professor in Department of Art Williams College. He graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the National College of Arts, Lahore, in 2004, and completed his Master of Fine Arts at Columbia University in 2010.

Mumtaz’s work is informed by his training in traditional Indian painting. He initially learnt this craft in his native city of Lahore and has continued to investigate techniques of Pahari painting, including the preparation of traditional natural pigments. Since, then his practice is concerned with the disappearance of traditions and histories in the wake of the modern, with a focus on 18th century North Indian painting.

His book, Faces of God: Images of Devotion in Indo-Muslim Painting, 1500–1800, situates manuscript illustrations and album paintings within cultures of devotion and ritual shaped by Islamic intellectual and religious histories. Being a professor Mumtaz has delivered various lectures, highlighting one at The Met Museum, The Annemarie Schimmel Memorial Lecture—“I Saw My Lord in the Form of a Beardless Youth”, in which he teaches how depictions of Muslim ascetics in this album aided in constructing the courtly persona of Dara Shikoh as a locus of godly manifestation within Indo-Muslim devotional culture.