Amahra Spence

Amahra Spence is an artist, curator, convener, strategist, researcher, systems designer and spatial practitioner. Inspired by social sculpture, her practice commits to infrastructure building, spatialising dream work, 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. A frequent speaker and guest lecturer, Amahra has presented, designed and taught at TEDxBrum, frank, NESTA, Bartlett School of Architecture, University of Manchester, AA School, Birmingham City University and Goldsmiths University of London, to name a few. Amahra led the establishment of initiatives such as the Black Imagination Fund, the Black Land and Spatial Justice Fund and the West Midlands Artist COVID-19 Impact Fund. Within the last five years, she has created and supported multiple mechanisms to directly shift over £5m of tangible resource to underinvested in communities and organisations. 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. Across projects more broadly, Amahra works collaboratively to reimagine the cultures, narratives, governance, models, structural logics, spaces, systems and practices of organisations across the creative, public, Built Environment and philanthropic sectors.