Nimisha Bhanot is a visual artist whose oil paintings explore the female gaze by critique and challenging the socio-political role of women and femmes from an integrative bicultural perspective, accepting and rejecting aspects of South Asian and North American culture. By juxtaposing cultural signifiers against tropes of sexual liberation and defiance against a heteropatriarchal society, Bhanot aims to empower women and femmes by encouraging individuality, protest and talking back to the status quo. By painting the often hidden, yet obviously true lives of South Asian women, Bhanot materializes something often swept under the rug into a real tangible object - taking away the shame and making it into something the public/society must confront. Bhanot received her BFA in Drawing and Painting from OCADU in 2013 and has been pursuing an independent practice since. Her work has been profiled on Buzzfeed, BBC, Huffington Post, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue and CBC Arts among others.