Ghada Amer was born 1963 in Cairo, Egypt. She is a contemporary artist living and working in New York City. She emigrated from Egypt to the US at age 11 and was educated in Paris and Nice. Much of her work deals with issues of gender and sexuality, particularly the representation of female nudes in art history as ideal objects rather than human beings with a sexuality and eroticism of their own. Her most notable body of work involves highly-layered embroidered paintings of women's bodies referencing pornographic imagery. 

Amer's work has been presented in numerous solo and group exhibitions at such venues as the the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington D.C.; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Cheim & Read, New York; Deitch Projects, New York; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; the 2007 and 1999 Venice Biennale; the 2000 Whitney Biennial; the 2000 Gwangju Biennale, South Korea; SITE Santa Fe, NM; the 1997 Johannesburg Biennale; Gagosian Gallery, London and Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills. She is the first Arab artist to have a one-person exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.