Amra is an independent art critic, researcher and curator based in Karachi, Pakistan. She holds a BFA from the Department of Visual Arts, University of Ottawa, Canada. She was a Nieman Affiliate at Harvard University and studied drawing, art history and criticism. She has been contributing reviews and critical writing for newspapers and publications in Pakistan and internationally since 1990. She was a co-founder and Senior Editor of NuktaArt, a first international bi-annual art publication from Karachi, Pakistan. Most notably, she has initiated issue based critique on contemporary art in Pakistan. She has edited the publication Homecoming, Rasheed Araeen (VM Gallery , Karachi 2015)
She started her art writing in 1990 from The Frontier Post, and was invited to initiate the weekly column on art in Encore, The News on Sunday. She has written for The Star, Friday Times, Libas, Art Now Pakistan, NuktaArt magazine, Gallery, Dawn, and for foreign publications such as Art India, Jamini and Circa among others. She currently writes for Dawn.
She has been Secretary of the Pakistan section of the International Art Critics Association (AICA, Paris) As Secretary AICA Pakistan, she was on the coordination team for the international seminar Mapping the Change. She conducted workshops for young art critics, on a national level, in affiliation with the British Council of Pakistan. She conducted a series of film showings for a year, bringing film collectives together, in collaboration with the Goethe Institute, Karachi. She is on the Nominating Committee for the prestigious Sovereign Art Prize, Hong Kong.
Her curatorial works include War Gardens, Koel Gallery, Karachi, October 2023, The Fragrant Garden, Koel Gallery, February 2020, Beyond the Waters, Koel Gallery, October-November, 2019, Objects We Behold: Gandhara Art Space and Museum, Karachi, 2018, Home Coming, Rasheed Araeen; A Retrospective, VM Art Gallery, 2014-15, Sabza O Gul, Chawkandi Art, 2014, among others.
Among her publications are a book, ‘Homecoming’, Rasheed Araeen (2014, VM Gallery, Karachi), a chapter titled, ‘Ruptures of Rasheed Araeen in the Politics of Visual Arts: For a New Discourse in Pakistan’ in the publication ‘Intersections of Contemporary Art, Anthropology and Art History in South Asia: Decoding Visual Worlds’, Edited by Dev Nath Pathak & Sasanka Parera (Pelgrave, 2018). She has also presented papers at national and international conferences and subsequently published them.
