At age 10, she got her first binoculars and joined a youth arm of the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds), the United Kingdom’s largest nature conservation charity.
At 17, she toured Ontario, Canada, as a violinist with a youth orchestra. “I love it so much,” she wrote home to her mother, who later told her she cried when she read those words. She suspected her accomplished daughter might make a life far from her English roots.
Gillian was 18 when she ventured 60 miles from home to Bradford University, in a city known for its large South Asian immigrant population, many of them Muslim. It was there, through a close girlfriend, that she became drawn to Islam while studying business, ultimately pursuing a doctorate in international marketing.
Near the end of her PhD studies in 1980, she found a position as a visiting professor at SUNY (State University of New York) Buffalo. There, in a stroke of good fortune, her boss introduced her to a colleague who would become her husband—a fellow ex-pat, Essam Mahmoud, who was asked to help her find her way around.
“He’s my biggest supporter,” Gillian says. “He always was during my academic career, and now he is hugely proud of my art. My being able to paint was a surprise to both of us.”
Their dual careers took them from Montreal to Morgantown, WV, and from Flint, MI, to Denton, TX, until they settled in Phoenix in 1990. Gillian had accepted a position there at the then-Thunderbird, The American Graduate School of International Management, where she taught for 16 years. She also was a Senior Fulbright Scholar at the University of Bahrain in 1996-97.
It was her volunteer work as a docent at the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix that led her to botanical art. “I just felt the urge to draw or paint and I started to take nature sketching classes,” she recalls. As well, “I found so many people I had things in common with.”
She completed the Garden’s certificate program in 2010. Three years later, she was invited to join ASBA’s board. What she’d enjoyed most about her academic career–hours spent in research and writing–quickly became filled with work that drew her ever closer to the people and activities she deeply loves: painting and drawing, writing, and exploring the natural world.
A sampling of her activities: She joined the Maricopa Audubon Society board and edited its quarterly publication from 2013-2019. She illustrated plants for an Audubon Arizona program that helps urban students experience nature, and she contributed illustrations to Legumes of Arizona: An Illustrated Flora and Reference, a joint project of Boyce Thompson Arboretum and the University of Arizona.
A juried member of the Arizona Art Alliance, she was awarded “Best in Wet Medium” in the Southwest Society of Botanical Artists’ exhibition in Tempe, AZ, in 2011-12. Her work was included in ASBA’s 17th Annual International exhibition in 2014; Botanical Art Worldwide: America’s Flora, 2019; and the Fourth New York Botanical Garden Triennial, Abundant Future: Cultivating Diversity in Garden, Farm, and Field, 2021-2023.
Meanwhile, she became indispensable to ASBA. “I really can’t imagine managing without her,” ASBA Executive Director Jody Williams wrote in comments nominating her for the White Award.
Gillian describes herself as shy, an introvert. Yet before the COVID-19 pandemic moved ASBA’s annual meetings online, you could most often find her in the center of a knot of fellow artists.
“At ASBA,” she says, “I found my kindred spirits. You feel it in your heart.”