Tooba Safeer

Artist Bio

Pakistani-American Tooba Safeer was born in New York City, and was raised in Pakistan and the United States. Throughout dozens of moves across the U.S & globally, Houston was headquarters to her family and served as an anchor between all of her homes - across states and countries. Ultimately, her family settled down at the border town of McAllen, TX, fond of the similarity they discovered between Mexican culture and their Pakistani heritage.

Now a Houston-based Aerospace Engineer by day and a Box13 painter by evening, Tooba focuses on acrylic and oil paints as her primary mediums. She is deeply interested in traditional painting techniques, such as Islamic art, Mughal manuscripts, Mexican Surrealism, Renaissance classical portraiture, and grisaille; she fuses them to explore culture, healing, and visual communication. Her work is centered around digesting immigrant identity, love, grief, and community.

In Fall 2025, her painting series Shifa: A Healing Series wasfeatured in a solo-exhibit at the Pearl Fincher Museum of Fine Arts, in Spring, TX. In Shifa, Tooba has thoroughly documented the physical, emotional, and psychological recovery of a traumatic incident which left her with a speech impairment and eating disabilities. Tooba received a B.S in Electrical Engineering from UTRGV and M.S. in Power Engineering from UW-Madison. She studies art in her free time, is mostly self-taught, and has supplemented with painting classes at the Art League Houston. 

toobasafeer.com | IG @toobs_s