Ghada Amer

Ghada Amer (born 1963, Cairo, Egypt) is a contemporary artist whose practice challenges dominant narratives around gender, sexuality, labor, and representation. Working primarily with embroidery, painting, sculpture, and installation, Amer reclaims traditionally feminized craft techniques—especially needlework—to confront patriarchal structures within both art history and society. Her works often feature layered, stitched images of women drawn from art historical, popular, and pornographic sources, deliberately complicating ideas of desire, agency, and authorship. By merging abstraction with figuration and craft with conceptual rigor, Amer positions embroidery as a site of political resistance and feminist reclamation. She lives and works between New York City and Paris.