Nasreen Mohamedi was born in 1937 in Karachi, Pakistan. She was one of eight children. Her mother passed away when she was very young. Her father owned a photographic equipment shop in Bahrain, among other business ventures. Her family moved to Mumbai in 1944.
Mohamedi attended St. Martin's School of the Arts, in London, from 1954 to 1957. Then Mohamedi studied on a scholarship in Paris from 1961 to 1963, and when she returned to India, she joined the Bhulabhai Institute for the Arts in Mumbai, where she met other artists working at the time, including V.S. Gaitonde, M.F. Husain and Tyeb Mehta.
