Painter, illustrator, sculptor, and performance and installation artist Ghada Amer (Egyptian, b.1963) was born in Cairo. When she was 11 years old, her family moved to France, where Amer attended school in Paris and Nice. In 1989, she received an MFA from the École nationale supérieure d'art in Nice, and began exhibiting her works in the 1990s. A central theme in her work is the equality of women and female sexuality. By using embroidery on pornographic images, for example, Amer attempts to undermine the typical use of such images by alluding to female pleasure.
Amer's work has been shown at the Whitney Biennial and PS1 Contemporary Art Center in New York, at the Venice Biennale, the Museum Fridericianum in Kassel, at the Johannesburg Biennial, and the Istanbul Biennale.
Amer lives and works in New York.