Spandita Malik

Brooklyn, NY
Portfolio

Spandita Malik is an Indian visual artist based in New York City whose practice weaves photography with traditional embroidery and storytelling. Collaborating with women across India, she creates intimate works that reclaim agency and challenge dominant narratives, reimagining how women’s lives and resilience are represented in contemporary visual culture.

Project: Jāḷī—Meshes of Resistance
My work explores how women in India—often restricted by patriarchal systems—construct their own familial networks through embroidery. Collaborating on embroidered portraits, women reclaim agency, revive memory, and resist the silencing forces of patriarchy and gendered violence. Whether recounting domestic abuse, reshaping family archives, or creating hidden collectives, they form chosen families sustained by care and storytelling. Stitching across homes, generations, and distances, these works challenge who preserves history and who defines belonging. What if family is not what we inherit, but what we make—one thread, one portrait, one act of shared resilience at a time?