Akbar Padamsee is a contemporary Indian artist and painter, considered one of the pioneers in Modern Indian painting along with Raza, Souza and M.F. Hussain. Over the years he has also worked with various mediums from oil painting, plastic emulsion, water colour, sculpture, printmaking, to computer graphics, and photography, as worked a film maker, sculptor, photographer, engraver, and lithographer. Today his paintings are among the most valued by modern Indian artists. His painting Reclining Nude was sold for USD 1,426,500 at Sotheby's in New York on 25 March 2011. He was born on 12 April 1928 in Mumbai. He was awarded the Lalit Kala Akademi Fellowship (Lalit Kala Ratna) by the Lalit Kala Akademi, India's National Academy of Arts, in 1962, the Kalidas Samman from the Madhya Pradesh Government in 1997 for Plastic Arts and the Padma Bhushan, India's third highest civilian honour in 2010.

He received his diploma from the Sir J.J. School of Art in Mumbai. He left for Paris in 1951 and lived and worked there till his return in 1967. Among several shows he has had major retrospectives in Mumbai and New Delhi in 1980. He has participated in the exhibitions, Seven Indian Painters, Gallery One, London in 1958'Intemational Biennales at Venice; Sao Paulo and Tokyo; Museum of Modem Art, Oxford, 1981. Royal Academy of Arts, Festival of India, London 1982;Indian Artists in France, Paris 1985 among others. In 1967 he was invited as Artist-in Residence by the Stout State University, Wisconsin, USA. His very first solo show was held at the Jehangir Art Gallery in 1954, and soon he became one of leading artists. He received the Lalit Kala Akademi Fellowship in 1962, a fellowship by the Rockefeller Foundation in 1965 and was subsequently invited to be an artist-in-residence by the University of Wisconsin-Stout.