Dr Sara Raza is an award-winning contemporary art curator, art historian, and writer. She is the author of Punk Orientalism: The Art of Rebellion, published by Black Dog Press, London, in 2022. Sara holds a PhD from Middlesex University, London, having previously pursued a practice-based MPhil-PhD at the Royal College of Art, London, with a focus on Post-Soviet Orientalism and Decolonial Exhibition Making and Collecting Practices. She also earned an MA in 20th-Century Art History, Theory, and Philosophy from Goldsmiths, University of London, and holds a BA (Hons) in English Literature and History of Art from Goldsmiths.
Sara is the founder of Punk Orientalism Studio, a global curatorial studio practice in New York that works across exhibitions, scholarship, publishing, and consultancy. She is also the Artistic Director and Chief Curator of the Center for Contemporary Art in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. She is a Core Critic and faculty member at the Yale School of Art in the MFA Painting and Printmaking program.
A recognized curatorial and cultural thought leader, Sara has received several awards and honors for her curatorial work, including the ArtTable New Leadership Award for Women in the Arts and the Arts Council of England’s Curatorial Award. She was a finalist for the Walther Hopps Curatorial Award and has been honored as one of 40 influential global arts thinkers (Deutsche Bank/Apollo), a visual cultural expert on post-Soviet Central Asia and the Caucasus, and numerously profiled as a leading curator from the Middle East and North Africa and highlighted as one of 25 international female curators (Artnet). Sara and her work have been featured in major arts and national press, including Artforum, Art Africa, Artnet, Arab News, Architectural Digest, ArtAsiaPacific, BBC, Brownbook, Canvas, Contemporary Practices, Cultured, CNN Style, Harper’s Bazaar, Financial Times, L’Officiel, Al Jazeera, The National UAE, The New York Times, The Observer, Wall Street International, and others. For current and recent coverage see press.
Previously, she taught at New York University in the Departments of Media, Culture, and Communication; the Institute of Fine Arts (Vilcek Curatorial Program); and the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), where she was a Red Burns Fellow, as well as the School of Visual Arts, New York MA Curatorial Programme. She was a curator of public programs at Tate Modern, London and has also designed the curriculum of the first MA in Museum Studies Program in Central Asia for the Art and Culture Development Foundation under the Ministry of Culture of Uzbekistan. She is a regular jury member for major art prizes, including the Vilcek Foundation, Creative Time, Shed, Ruth Award, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. She has also been a guest critic at MIT, Parsons, RISD, and Yale. She has lectured and participated in panels and discussions internationally, including at the Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe, Germany; Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island; San Jose State University; Bishkek Historical Museum, Kyrgyzstan; Queen Mary University, Westminster University; Sharjah Biennial March Meeting, United Arab Emirates; Intelligence Squared, United Kingdom, London; the State Museum of History of Uzbekistan, Tashkent, Uzbekistan; Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London; Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris; American University of Sharjah; Casa Arabe, Madrid; Davis Museum at Wellesley College, Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Phillips Collection, Washington; University of Sydney, Australia; the New Museum, New York; New York University; The Whitney Museum of American Art; MacKenzie Art Gallery; Duke University and Nasher Museum; John F Kennedy Center, Washington; Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti, Milan; Princeton University; New York School of Visual Arts; New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program; ING Creatives Dubai; New York Law School; among others. For a full list see talks. Sara has been an arts writer since 2002 and has been the desk editor for West and Central Asia for ArtAsiaPacific magazine since 2004. She has written for numerous art journals, books, exhibition catalogs, and peer-reviewed academic periodicals. Her writing has been translated into Arabic, Chinese, Farsi, French, German, Italian, Russian, and Spanish. She has also written several long-form art historical critical essays for artist monographs and scholarly catalogs. For a full list, see writing.
