Michelle Obama is extraordinary, but she is also the kind of woman that exists in a way that is - she's a hundred percent relatable to all kinds of people, all genders all around the world.

The people I choose as models have a quality that seems to contain the past, the present, and the future all at once. It's hard to explain. I can look at 100 people in a room but only find it in one person.

My mother was willing to support art as a summer program for me. She never supported it as a career decision until I won the National Gallery Portrait Competition.

I want my portraits to create a space where blackness can breathe.

Beautiful film music can be made relevant to any period.

As a bookish child in Calcutta, I used to thrill to the adventures of bad girls whose pursuit of happiness swept them outside the bounds of social decency. Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina lived large in my imagination. The naughty girls of Hollywood films flirted and knew how to drive.

In live-action, writing, production, and editing happen in discrete stages. In animation, they overlap - happening simultaneously. This allows a real dialogue to occur between the writer, the director, the actors, and the editor, and it makes the writing process a lot more collaborative and a lot less lonely.

Woman is the sun, an extraordinary creature, one that makes the imagination gallop.