Dilara Begum Jolly is a Bangladeshi printmaker, painter and crossmedia artist who was born in 1960. She was a founding member of the artists’ group Shomoy, and has been working against the grain of the mainstream art since. She has been re-examining the position of women in society through a feminist lens, and has created over the years an oeuvre by pushing boundaries of art and crossing mediums. She studied painting and printmaking at the Government Art College in Chittagong, obtaining her bachelor’s degree in 1981. She completed her Master of Fine Arts in painting at the Institute of Fine Arts, now Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Dhaka, in 1984. In 1991, she enrolled in a post-diploma course in printmaking at Santiniketan, West Bengal, India, with a scholarship from the Indian Government. Jolly began her career as a printmaker and then worked across mediums when she started to use installations that often defy categorisation. In her recent installations, Jolly has used pinpricked photographs and soft sculptures made of fabric. Dilara Begum Jolly was part of many national- and international-level exhibitions, including A Beast, a God and a Line at Dhaka Art Summit, in 2018.
