Sadaf Munshi is a US-based linguist, poet, visual artist, writer and critic. Born and raised in Kashmir (India), she started her career as a playwright for the state television Doordarshan in the mid-1990s, while pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in Biosciences in her hometown, Srinagar. With little scope for artistic and cultural activities amidst continued political turmoil, she decided to leave Kashmir in 1996 and traveled, first to the Indian capital New Delhi, where she spent four years, and then to the United States in 2001 in pursuit of higher education. Having started her journey as a small-town girl in conservative Kashmir, Munshi made various leaps and bounds as a person of multifaceted interests. 

Munshi is currently serving as the professor and chair of the Department of Linguistics at the University of North Texas. Her linguistic research, funded by multiple grants from the US National Science Foundation, focuses on the documentation of endangered and moribund languages and poetic traditions of Jammu and Kashmir in India and northern areas of Pakistan. She specializes in language documentation, historical linguistics, language contact, poetics and verbal arts with a special interest in Burushaski (a linguistic isolate), Indo-Aryan languages such as Kashmiri, Mankiyali, and Romani (or “Gypsy” language),and background in Sanskrit, Persian, French, and Latin. Her work has been published in various peer-reviewed international journals in Europe, the United States and elsewhere. Her recent book published by Brill Publication (Boston| Leiden) in 2019 is a descriptive and comparative account on Srinagar Burushaski, a lesser-known variety of Burushaski. The outcomes of her documentation work are available in the form of Burushaski Language Resource, a digital corpus housed at the Digital Library of the University of North Texas.

A prolific poet and critic, Munshi writes in Kashmiri, English and Urdu/Hindi. She has published numerous pieces on a wide range of topics related to language, society, culture, politics and gender. Her social and political critiques and personal accounts and her interviews have appeared in many newspapers and/or magazines such as Kashmir Observer, Rising Kashmir, Kashmir Times, Greater Kashmir, Cerebrations, Denton Record Chronicle, Live Mint, Economic and Political Weekly, Scroll.in, and Huffington Post, among others. Munshi also has a great passion for painting. A self-taught visual artist and art critic, she has produced numerous pieces of art in oil, watercolor, and multimedia. A solo exhibition of her paintings was organized/hosted by the Jammu & Kashmir Academy of Art, Culture and Languages in 2014 — the first-of-its-kind by a woman artist in the state.