About Amahra Spence
(she/her) – Birmingham, UK – Interdisciplinary cultural worker, performance artist and curator. Hosted by
TORCH – The Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities, Humanities Division, University of Oxford.
Amahra Spence is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, convener, strategist, systems designer and spatial practitioner. Inspired by social sculpture, her practice is rooted in infrastructure building, spatialising dream work, regenerative resource redistribution and platforming radical imagination as tactics for emancipation from systems of violence. She is most passionate about co-creating worlds and architectures that safeguard the resistance, joy and collective imagination of oppressed peoples globally.
As Founding Director of MAIA (2013) and Organiser of The Black Land & Spatial Justice Project (2020), she leads teams engaging culture, land and the politics of space to build real-time strategies for Black liberation. This includes Land Black, a research and speculative design studio prototyping anti-carceral architectural and land-based strategies. Amahra also pioneered Yard (2020), turning a residential townhouse into a neighbourhood site of imagination, artist residency space and community hub. She is currently working to create Abuelos, an artist-led hotel and cultural space, grown from the spirit of Grandad’s house.
Engaging the transformation of systems as cultural work, Amahra has developed performance art, curated multimedia work, designed civic infrastructure and also published writing on the politics of the British land system, migrant resistance, Afroecology, hip hop and architecture, legacies of community infrastructure building, the future of hospitality, speculative urban planning, alternative arts education and life-affirming economics.